Gonzo Awards: Biggest Scam Of The Year
Esports is perhaps the easiest world to run all manner of hustles, scams, cons and swindles. Too many people only here for the big win and too many grifters here for easy pickings.
Previous Winners
🥇 2013: Sons of Starcraft Documentary
🥇 2014: Harold Goldberg: The League of Legends Experience
🥇 2015: No Award
🥇 2016: No Award
And the winner is… Overwatch 2 And The Overwatch League
Almost everything associated with Overwatch has been a complete failure from start to finish and 2023 finally seems to be the year that the proverbial penny has dropped for all those that have been duped. While it was always going to be hard to bridge the gap between Tumblr sex weirdos – the game’s primary audience – and hardcore esports fans, Activision Blizzard somehow believed they could serve two masters by keeping the Church of Widowmaker’s Feet and the State of Franchised Esports separate. That faulty premise alone was the root cause of most of the IP’s problems, casual players feeling under-served when it came to content and annoyed at game balance seemingly having the esports focus in mind… Esports fans similarly felt that the split in resource management meant that the league that had so much invested in it was ultimately second fiddle to the main game.
Trying to force an esport has always been a bad idea but it’s one that Activision Blizzard and particularly Arch-Shitlord Bobby Kotick have refused to learn. This year though was the one where it all came crashing down, mostly in silence, as desperate measures to save both the game and the esport failed amid a company wide merger with Microsoft that suggests the title will never be a real priority ever again.
How did the casuals get scammed? How abut that hastily conceived and published sequel that offered next to nothing in the way of new content and whose primary ingredients were broken promises and outright lies. The major promise at the heart of the new game was that there’d be a PvE mode where players could level up their favourite characters the more they played à la Call of Duty or Battlefield. Needing to rush the game out, supposedly to try and inject renewed interest into their failing esports league, they scrapped this entirely rendering the new game little more than a graphical update. Well, at least you can still play against those who didn’t buy the sequel, another key promise in the game’s development… Except they simply shut down Overwatch 1 servers to migrate everyone to a sequel many were starting not to even want at this point. The funniest part is that once the furore had died down a bit they actually had the nerve to then sell the PvE content they had developed to the Overwatch 2 playerbase for $15 a pop.
As for the esports league, well there has never been a funnier denouement in all of esports. After the grifter class managed to pry loose the purse chains of venture capital investment they themselves in turn were finessed by Kotick and pals into paying tens of millions of dollars for franchise slots in an esport that ultimately was never going to trouble the big titles for viewership or interest long term. 2023 was the year where everything got fucked up spectacularly. Forget franchises moving to regions that didn’t make any sense or the ever dwindling viewership, crucially the negative headlines around Activision Blizzard’s abuse of women they employed had many wondering if Andrew Tate had taken over. Those one time supposedly unprecedented sponsorship deals were gone and never coming back, making the league an even bigger money sink than it had ever been.
Then the game itself essentially got banned in China after an argument between an unnamed “jerk” and a NetEase executive led to their distribution deal being terminated. This is a problem just in pure business terms due to the fact that every non-Chinese company needs a Chinese partner to even do business in the region but even more so when you consider NetEase owned an Overwatch team themselves. Underestimating the solidarity of Chinese companies Activision Blizzard couldn’t find a replacement and had to go crying to Steam meaning one of their major competitors is now taking a cut of their business.
With Overwatch 2’s launch being a disaster and not moving the dial at all in terms of esports interest the owners of the teams finally got wise that this league was a bust and started to communicate with Activision Blizzard about exit strategy. In the end the slots that were going to be worth the same as NFL teams (according to the fucking dunderheads who bought them) were now worth a paltry $6 million back from the developer who just desperately wanted to shut down the league once and for all.
They did so with no real official statement or messaging, just an acknowledgement it was over and that Overwatch esports would be back later in some form, which of course means the Saudi Arabian state can have it along with everything else. There won’t be any apologies for how badly this set esports back or how terribly they treated their consumers. Many of the people responsible for it all will fail upwards or call in favours to ensure they can go and fuck up a start up with someone else’s money. There will never be anything like this era of Overwatch ever again, a class based shooter turned into a gacha game for pornsick losers and an esport that was founded on ponzi scheme logic, the absolute worst of two industries.
Since Activision fused with Blizzard so many things went downhill there, including having the worst ceo of all time as a boss. What a spectacular fail Overwatch turned into. And it’s not a bad game. Sad
How many drafts? I'm genuinely curious...you must've started typing this up like 4 years ago and meticulously trimmed the fat into this concise and righteous nithing pole