It’s actually not a lot of revenue based on the little that we know about player salaries and the franchise fees. An OWL team with only $1.4M in revenue is probably seriously underwater. No wonder they are trying to get the franchise fees renegotiated.
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The sad part is they had a naturally growing esports scene. I remember watching the Apex tournaments all the time when they were being played. Then Blizzard stuck their grimy hands in there and killed the naturally growing esports scene to instead inflate the scene with OWL.
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It’s a lot for a 3 year old dying game with no updates
I wish I had something I could do thats been irrelevant for years and still make 6 figures
You believe this? Wait until you find out how much owners paid to buy the teams. Nobody won.
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I’d like to know what kind of legal requirement (if any) Activition/Blizzard has with the OWL teams and players to keep running the league.
Could Activiction/Blizzard unilaterally decide to stop running OWL with no notice the way they did with HGC for Heroes of the Storm? Or would that get them into legal hot water with the teams, players, or other stakeholders?
Take into account player salaries ($50,700 per year minimum), other staff (coaches, HR, PR & marketing, logistics), plus the entry fee most teams still have to pay, and then it’s really not that much.
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You seem to be confusing revenue and profit. They aren’t the same thing.
And plenty of businesses with poor product bring in decent revenue. It’s the profit margin that’s the key.
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Nobody wanted a forced and predictably doomed league in the first place. Scrap it and make Overwatch great again. Casual player base first.
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Maybe games should be about fun and not a competitive sport for money? Being a “pro gamer” sounds unhealthy and shouldnt be a real job.
No confusion 
I’m curious to see what 2023 looks like now that the game is actually being updated again for the first time in years.
I’ve seen a Blizzard dead game with more regular updates.
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Maybe if OWL fails they will finally stop putting “pros” and streamers above the rest of the playerbase
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Covid really wrecked things. The league was just starting to move to in-person home matches, which the franchises were counting on for revenue. Ticket/merch/snack sales were going to be huge revenue vehicles.
I know it’s cool on the forums to hate on the league, even though most of the haters don’t watch or understand anything about it, but just know that this isn’t an “I told you so Blizz. Yay OWL bad, bad balancing.” situation, guys. It’s all about revenue.
It’s weird to treat this as some sort of win for the community. It’s actually quite bad for esports and gaming in general if things don’t turn around for OWL. You’ll see a bigger push toward in-game monetization than ever without OWL.
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no not really… twitch dropped their deal with OWL a lot because they saw the numbers were TOO BAD for what the league promised. twitch was actually pretty smart and blizzard greedy and took the youtube deal. LA arena was not sold out, they gave tickets away for free just to fill it up.
it probably would helped somehow, but the downfall started already on twitch in the early stages. it just got worse and more noticeable.
Good let it burn 
(20 Character)
They can now adjust the game for the average players.
Leave it to the forums to be extremely shortsighted 
This is the correct take. Localization, home ticket sales, and merch sales were the thing that was supposed to keep this franchise up.
Mostly just entertainment companies. Real companies sort of have to cater to what their customers demand or nobody buys.
people still think owl takes dev time and Ressources away from the main game?
lmao thats cute.
if the league actually shuts down then it will mark a sad moment no more real overwatch gameplay just some random rolled together teams smacking their heads at each other.
well Atleast i had 4 years to enjoy it.
its a bit scary to me seeing how much joy people get from that.
i would be standing there too laughing at them loosing their job.
My boss would have already fired me when i did that bad.