Overwatch League, We Hardly Knew Ye

This week confirms that Overwatch is in dire straits with team owners being offered millions to walk away from the league. Who could have seen it coming?

What a week for Overwatch. The Activision Blizzard quarterly earnings report always makes for a good read, simultaneously filled to the brim with fantastical new ways to bend the truth and awkward admissions, but this one is an all-timer. In plain English they said that interest in the game had “sequentially declined.” It’s almost as if making a game that is explicitly marketed to the sex weirdo refugees of Tumblr isn’t a winning idea. If you think that’s hyperbole by the way, explain why it’s the only video game with a fucking Wikipedia page chronicling the history of the pornography made about it.

It was also unveiled that to counteract this declining interest and them so spectacularly fucking up their Netease deal that they would now be selling the game on Steam, meaning one of their key business rivals will be having a slice of “all” those sales and, thanks to Steam’s semi-transparency when it comes to the numbers, see just how few people play the damn thing.

Well, at least the esports side of things is in good standing. What’s that? There is going to be a vote among the teams as to whether or not they should accept $6 million to LEAVE. It’s like the old joke about prostitutes, which of course given the people who participated in this charade these past few years, is also appropriate. I wonder which way the voting will go… $6 million for a franchise slot people couldn’t sell for $1 million just months ago. $6 million for a franchise slot so worthless in the grand scheme of things one team literally just walked away from it like a clapped out car. $6 million to get out of a league with no meaningful viewership, no sponsors and facing a company takeover that likely means no future? Oh I’m sure the persuasion required will be like 12 Angry Men.

I mean, I’ve seen some incredible esports failures in my two decades in this business but paying $114 million to partners to PLEASE MAKE IT STOP makes OWL the absolute worst of the worst. Remember this was a league that they said was too good for esports plebs to actually be a part of, their initial pitch being made exclusively to venture capital and sports groups. This was a league where they claimed expansion slots would be as high as $60 million to buy. This was a league where the slots were meant to be so valuable Blizzard demanded 25% back of any resale.

To describe this as an utter defeat on all fronts is too understated. For years AB have made incredible claims about their abilities in the space of gaming and esports. They’ve run every IP they own into the dirt, the games shadows of what attracted fans to them in the first place, yet they were at one time great. As a property Overwatch has had less cultural impact than the Zube Tube. Aside from the aforementioned pornography it serves mostly as a source of cringe, a “power of friendship” video game anime for people who find anime problematic. When one of your developers is begging another, more successful video game franchise to include one of your characters it’s probably a sign that it just isn’t as iconic as you keep telling people it is.

The discontinued Overwatch 2 LEGO set, coming to a thrift store near you

By the same token to have to put your games on Steam is also delicious schadenfreude after the way you’ve treated your customers. Battle.net went from being a tool to facilitate play to a gaudy strip mall, the utility dwarfed by the lurid advertisements for loot boxes and battle passes as classics are turned into hollow Gacha games for the benefit Bobby Kotick’s money pile. But for Overwatch specifically there’s not been enough outrage about what they did in selling an unnecessary sequel on false promises, revoking features that were many’s sole reason for purchase and then selling parts of those already developed features as additional content for $15 a pop. Now Valve will tax you for selling games that you have already made. Hope the comedy of that isn’t lost on your executives.

The most magnificent of their claims though was that they knew esports better than anyone else. After all, they made Starcraft and just look at how big that game was in South Korea, a result of Blizzard’s smart development and curation. The problem with this narrative is that it’s complete hokum and the success of Starcraft, nowhere near as big as Westerners would believe, was mostly down to a perfect storm of economic details and third parties who wanted to capitalise on them. If you want to look at Blizzard’s actual attempts at esports pay a visit to the graves of Starcraft 2, Hearthstone and Heroes of The Storm. Read the epitaphs explaining how they died and process the litany of terrible decisions made all while actual experts in esports gave them the type of free advice companies pay millions for. Hell, I was one of those people and I defy anyone to find a better aged outlook on the league than this interview. My only mistake was saying the failure of the OWL would drive investors away. Esports managed that before even Overwatch could die, a record in incompetence speedrunning.

I recall on the first day of the league’s broadcast how many of the insufferable grifters that populate this industry were quick to tell me that I was wrong and that Overwatch Esports was definitely a thing. So many deleted tweets, all those shit opinions, lost in time, like turds in the drain. As they self-fellated about the day one viewership, a number that remains its peak, I knew the fundamental esports truths would out. First and foremost you cannot ever force an esport. Those things were born from the efforts of dedicated nerds with a yen for competition and require games where excellence is immediately apparent even to a casual observer. I also knew that regional esports was some baby boomer bullshit. We’re digital now, we’re everywhere and nowhere. I don’t have to be a fan of my local team. I don’t even like where I live. Who the fuck wants to cheer for Philadelphia anyway?

They even turned down the option to use existing, successful esports brands and instead insisted that new franchises were created because that was central to the regional idea… Then they moved the teams. Like, I’m a Raiders fan so I know about the pains of a moving franchise but when you’ve got the Philadelphia team playing in Seoul your sport is a joke. Different formats almost every season, no grass roots scene, regional teams that aren’t in any way regional, a convoluted fixture list that constantly throws out meaningless games, a meta that was for long periods excruciating to watch even for the fans played on a game that you can’t balance so you just tell teams they can’t pick certain characters… You have to ask what even was the Overwatch League?

It’s probably worth reminding ourselves how Blizzard’s buddies in the media wrote about it both in the build up and all through its first year. The BBC asked if it was bigger than the Premier League. It was going to be the new NFL according to Wired and upend the world of esports. Bobby Kotick promised NFL and NBA sized revenue shares. The Verge said it was the thrilling future of esports. The ratings, self reported and massively inflated by various marketing strategies many might consider dubious, were supposedly higher than Thursday Night Football. Their last major tournament maintained an average of 61,000 viewers.

A special shoutout to Sean Campbell VP of Reach3 insights who wrote a guest article saying that the Overwatch league was proof that esports markerting works. His only other article on the site? One speaking about the promise of Google Stadia. Finger on the pulse.

Where did the 10 million go?

Not one of these minds, nor any of the esports rubberneckers that I am going to spare the blushes of in a final act of mercy, had the competence or the backbone to push back on any of these outlandish claims. The stakeholders in the league lied right up until the point they couldn’t anymore and the games and esports media, fearing the usual petty reprisals from Blizzard, mostly let them do it. Now, that the company has disgraced itself in every way imaginable, suddenly we can tell the truth and say how gosh darn obvious it was that the league would fail. In a time when everyone is so savvy about the grifts of crypto and NFTs why did no-one point out the only thing giving the franchise slots value was the same greater fool theory those industries rely on? Why did no-one say that taking proof of concept from sports and then applying it to something that wasn’t sports might not be a solid foundation on which to build something?

The Overwatch League, which I shall be writing about in the past tense in all my work from now on, wasn’t just an abject failure. It’s conceptualisation was a greed driven hijacking of esports, a facsimile of the real thing that had no soul. It opened the door for everyone to start franchise slots and partnered leagues, where competition goes to die. It broke esports down to the bare minimum it can be – players representing brands under the guise of representing you – and was as valued by Activision Blizzard’s suits to the same degree as their latest billboard campaign. It was corporate slop served up as haute cuisine. Had it been successful esports would have been a worse place than it is now, a brutal thing to accept when the entire space has been reduced to a Saudi Arabian plaything.

And no, I’m not going to comply with the esports narrative that demands I should be sad about Blizzard people losing their jobs. Games Developers are a fucking scourge on esports. They think that just because they made a game they own anything and everything that relates to it, that their ideas about things are sacrosanct, total obedience the cost of being allowed in their little empire. They come to third party events and make outrageous demands, berating and belittling staff, all under the threat of taking away a license to use their game for an enterprise that adds value to their product. That includes the “little people” too, all of them too quick to drop who they work for in the hope of special treatment. The pandering to that power dynamic is why companies like Activision Blizzard and Riot Games got away with mistreating so many people for so much time. These are the same “little people” who have said nothing about their company blacklisting journalists, stopping broadcast talent from working events they have every right to or casting out players they deem to be a brand risk while running the only league in which they can play. They were all real quiet about those jobs so fuck them all and their self-pitying videos begging for work. If I was starving these people wouldn’t throw me their scraps. The broadcast talent that spun Blizzard’s straw into gold will all be fine and welcomed with open arms by every other functional esport so nothing of value is going to be lost.

In October, when the owners take the money and run, there will be a total rewriting of history regarding this project. They will say they always knew it was a gamble and that they never proselytized about how incredible it was. They will also make out that they came out of it OK and didn’t really lose that much money, a lie of omission as they were never spending their money to begin with. There will be much bemoaning about how the pandemic really killed the league when in fact it absolutely extended its lifespan. People will point to the disappointment of Overwatch 2 when those in the know understand the mainstream player base got sold short as its rushed release was prioritised to try and keep the league upright. In reality it was always a bad idea, founded on bad principles and run by incompetent shitheels that will continue to fail upwards in this broken industry. Still, the death of the league will at least restore a little of my faith that even if it takes a longer time than we’d like these things will right themselves.