How did the debacle of the Overwatch League come about? Some casters analyze it and see many mistakes that have been lined up by the league.
Overwatch fans simply do not get a break. After the launch of Overwatch 2 was a disappointment and a large part of the PvE modes was cut, now the Overwatch League is also facing the axe.
Many former casters and fans are currently analyzing what went wrong. Even though there seems to be agreement that the Overwatch League is disappearing, some have hope: After this, it can only get better.
What’s going on with the Overwatch League? Blizzard has announced that team owners will be allowed to vote after the current season whether they want to continue under “new guidelines”. If they opt out, each team will receive $6 million.
Since Blizzard has also laid off 50 employees, a large part of the eSports department, it seems that this vote is just a formality. It appears that it is already assumed that the team owners will take the money and put a checkmark next to it.
What do the casters say about it? Erik Lonnquist, known to many as “DoA”, is one of the original Overwatch casters and has commented on games even before the Overwatch League was founded.
He left the Overwatch League in 2019 because, in his view, “promises were not kept” and due to “the incompetence at the upper management level of the Overwatch League”. He further explains:
We had the right people, the resources, and, most importantly, a great game. The people in leadership were changed in 2019 and from then on it went downhill.
In the meantime, Lonnquist even believes that Overwatch is better off without the league:
I honestly believe that Overwatch eSports will be better when the Overwatch League disappears. Bring back regional leagues with regional identity. Bring back tournaments in the MLG style on weekends.
The three big mistakes of the Overwatch League
The former caster Makowski also has an opinion on this and outlines what he thinks went wrong with the Overwatch League:
The biggest advantage of eSports, according to Makowski, is that it exists online and is therefore fundamentally global. A localization would have ruined that – especially since many players did not live near the city they represented in the team. There was hardly any community interaction or local collaborations. Putting city names over team names was therefore considered a mistake.
The second mistake was, according to Makowski, that team owners were expected to build a new brand each. Instead of using their old, already established brand names, they had to combine the team name with a city and build a completely new brand. This costs time and money, both of which could have been used differently. Telling a well-known team name that it cannot use this name in Overwatch “will go down in history as a major blunder”.
The third mistake was the high entry fee. Until then, organizations had operated relatively efficiently without needing to build up large capital. Several million dollars in fees forced companies to raise money and simultaneously raised expectations that it would be profitable – while it was never quite clear how that was supposed to work.
This created unrealistic expectations for both investors and companies. Furthermore, companies were effectively forced to promote a game in which they competed out of their own pockets.
But the community is also pondering mistakes.
Blizzard had more or less let Overwatch 1 die without reason by virtually halting development to focus instead on Overwatch 2. This lack of new content would not have been good for the eSports scene – especially in a game that still had so much growth potential, as was the case with Overwatch.
What does the future of eSports in Overwatch look like? That is uncertain. Most think that eSports in Overwatch will recover on its own as soon as it no longer runs under the banner of the Overwatch League and new tournaments and formats emerge.
Others hope that after the acquisition by Microsoft, there will simply be a major restart and the Overwatch League will be fundamentally rebuilt.
Which of these scenarios will come true remains to be seen. But the Overwatch League is likely to go down in history as one of the biggest blunders in the history of Activision Blizzard and esports in general.
