Why isn’t Overwatch a good esport?
Where are the tournaments? Why isn’t it popular?
Honestly, I’m an old gamer and used to play 15 years ago. I understand that CS is in first place because it’s been around for a long time and is easy to follow for people who don’t know the game, while OW is a mess, but is LoL really easy for people who don’t play? Something definitely went wrong for OW in that direction.
Any sport implies stable unchanging rules and a stable game scenario.
CS is most suitable for sports.
In OW, the rules and balance of heroes are constantly changing.
Also, you can’t train muscle memory for one hero, because counterpicking another hero quickly loses that muscle memory.
The degradation of the scenario to 5v5 raid boss vs raid boss improved the sports component a bit, but led to an exodus of players who played for fun to MR.
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How dota is so popular then ?
Well, lol is much slower than overwatch no? And also overwatch is first person so it’s extra hard to see what is going on when you’re viewing it
Popularity is a big issue
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It’s because it’s not an intuitive game to follow for people who haven’t played it before.
Counter-Strike is easy to follow: Shoot enemy, plant bomb, defuse bomb. Easy. Sure, there’s way more to CS than that. But the basics are simple enough for anyone to follow.
Overwatch is almost the exact opposite of that. Rivals won’t be a good Esport for exactly the same reason.
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There are tournaments, but currently in other countries outside the US. Theres currently one in Japan right now.
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Because Overwatch is a very complex game and it may not be the best experience for casual audiences
This even includes watching the game as a spectator
Have you seen Valorant´s professional scene?
They are all rumbling in spawn before the match starts.
And when the gates open, everyone runs and press forward like a madman
… then all of the sudden, THEY ALL STOP before reaching a turn; and stay in the same place, camping the same corner, for the next 20mins
And that´s it. Whoever gets tired of playing The Wall´s Bodyguard, dies first. That´s all there is; and Counter Strike is not much better than Valorant
Regular players want games they feel like they can actually jump in the match and do somewhat similar to what they saw on YouTube
But the skill gap between Low and High ranks in Overwatch, is too wide
Oh and by the way, Valorant doesn´t have, among many other things, respawn during match.
So enjoy the next 11mins & 30seconds while you watch others play xD
The best way to understand the difference between Overwatch and any other shooter is quite simple
Pay attention to the promo videos on YouTube
Overwatch is the only game, that with real actual ingame footage, tries to make the game… slower
While other titles try to look like the most explosive festival of the best action movies rated on IMDB
Or another way to visualize this
Because Overwatch is a very complex game
is also quite simple
The top50 PUBG players, and the very Elite from Valorant and Counter Strike pros, are Plat in Overwatch
Plat
… but in case you still wonder, all the top500 streamers from Overwatch have already reached the highest ranks in Marvel Rivals
within two weeks
And that´s how complex MR is
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Because of Steam. Because of Valve. And because of Pool Prizes
Remove any of the three, and no one would remember that name
What are you talking about?
The Overwatch Championship Series just had tournaments last year. They’ve already had the qualifiers for this year for Stage 1 of the Championship Series 2025 (they ran for 3 days, from January 16th to the 19th). The regular season starts on the 31st in 4 days time.
The reason the Overwatch League failed was because it was pushed as a major eSports event with a massive buy-in, and that restricted the number of skilled players who could compete. Then there were the various Activision-Blizzard scandals, which caused advertisers to bolt, etc.
https://esports.overwatch.com/en-us/schedule
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This is a great point
In 2025, before learning from scratch a game as big like League of Legends, you are better of trying to learn something more useful
Like Chinese xD
Just like you said, the game is not slower than Overwatch; but it just happens that it runs in a isometric view
And we may not notice it, but turn it into a 1st person camera, and you got Overwatch as a result
Correct
And in my opinion, this is a problem
Players have no clue what happens in the professional scene from Overwatch
And I have no idea why Devs never pushed scheduled and Live games into the main menu
I´m watchin a few coaches on YouTube, and its crazy how many tournaments are playing all the time
Make a small frame that will only appear a couple of days with anticipation, and for the duration of the events, with links to Youtube and Twitch streams
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To play? It certainly isn’t much easier. I’ve never played it but my understanding is that games like league are insanely high apm games and they’re pretty complex so getting into mobas is pretty hard and time consuming like you said. It’s just very demanding
I meant more as a spectator from what I’ve seen it’s just easier to get a feel for what’s happening even if you don’t know much about the game. I’ve never really watched a moba tournament or much of anything really so I could be totally wrong on that, it was my impression from the little I’ve seen
League and cs are also just bigger games so the user base is bigger. Csgo is especially pretty straightforward to understand as a spectator.
Yeah idk overwatch can be pretty hard to get into
If I’m remembering correctly they used to in ow1. You had access to the schedule from the home screen as well as the replay viewer for recent matches. In ow2 that entire system just never got reimplemented I guess which is a bit of a shame.
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OW is in top 5 most watched fps games in 2024. So I don’t know what is the problem.
i wouldn’t mind balance changes, but my main issue is, Big tournament, like 40 rounds gets played on a massive dive patch. best brawl teams get eliminated.
befor the last 6 matches, they change the game into a brawl meta.
Wtf?
do a tournament, finish it.
change the game
next tournament
repeat
https://imgur.com/a/9AktdPp
https://imgur.com/a/uUuUQaE
https://imgur.com/a/WSIb4YQ
I remember having the casual family reunion and showing those edits on the phone to my cousin´s daughters, which are teenagers, and the reaction was unanimous
I have no idea what is happening there
I cannot express how it hit me. I actually thought they were going to say something like Wow, that build as super fast or, something, but no…
I don´t even think they knew it was Fortnite lol
But the impression was that this happens when we can´t abstract ourselves from complex games
Just like Overwatch
I know a girl from our group that has his boyfriend playing Warzone, and she never plays that game because she says its boring; because its too slow xD
I think a lot of people has this issue with Overwatch
The love the game, and want it to be the most celebrated game ever created; but the reality is that the game is not for everyone
And that is not good, or bad. We just have to accept that the game is too aggressive in its own competitive style
Marvel Rivals is a casual game. And again, that is not good or bad
Its just how it goes
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Not really.
Look at how popular something like Robot Wars is, how limited the ruleset and how dynamic and unstable every single battle is. And yet it makes for incredibly good and enjoyable viewing as a spectator sport.
I think the real reason OW failed as a spectator sport is because they pivoted away from smart team play resulting in big team fight spectacles to it becoming a more mechanical game while simultaneously making the mechanical difficulty much lower.
IE they dumbed down the game too much.
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Its easier to follow with an overhead pov and generally longer cd’s. Yes there are more things going on in the end but it slowly ramps up to that. People don’t start with all spells and all items.
To the uninitiated ow is a mess to watch.
No? The smart team play is what makes the game so unbelievably hard to understand to begin with. Casual players just have a hard time those concepts but have an easy time understanding “shooty hero hit shots”
https://youtu.be/D4bkWa_YL3Q case and point with perhaps the worst example in ow2 (the xqc clip is the only easy way to find this moment from the mauga meta forgive me)
It did become a more mechanical game but the team play hasn’t gone anywhere. And it’s certainly not the cause for issues with the esports (when it was reduced a bit to favor mechanical play)
Lets be real. The only people actually devoting time to and watching it for any meaningful length of time are people that understand how the game works, at least fundamentally.
Even the most novice of players can understand the nuance of a Zarya split second bubble blocking shatter and then bubbling her own Rein for a fatty shatty for example.
You can literally watch any game and pretty much any fps streamer if you just want to watch someone click heads, and mind you there are much better games to watch for that sort of content anyways.
There used to be mind games, there used to be nuance. Now it’s just whoever clicks a head first but the hitboxes are double the size, like wtf?
Teamplay has severely diminished with the new format. It’s a simple fact based on the logic that a ton of synergies were lost when we removed a tank. Just think about how much teamplay is involved playing Zarya or Dva vs playing Zarya or Dva in 2/2/2.
And it boggles my mind that they leaned more into mechanical gameplay and then made sure that pro players pretty much can’t miss based on how huge the hitboxes and projectiles have become.
And I’m giving some reasons as to why that, that’s all.
Your original statement suggested that there is none. Which is just not really true.