Blizzard’s Overwatch League was ambitious and doomed | Opinion
When Blizzard announced the Overwatch League in 2016, there were plenty of questions about how the esports league would actually work – but at the very least, you couldn’t fault the ambition.
The company envisaged city-based team franchises located all around the world, with each of the separately-owned teams – who each paid tens of millions of dollars in franchise fees to join the league – expected to build an esports arena in their cities, with the hope of attracting large live audiences for the games as well as online streaming audiences.
Borrowing heavily from US sports’ business models, it was a big, bold idea; it was never entirely clear whether it was also a good idea, but it was certainly enough to whip up interest from teams, with twenty of them ultimately joining the league at costs ranging from around $20 million to an eye-watering $65m.
Ultimately, those plans did not long survive contact with reality. This week, the Overwatch League confirmed what those following it closely have suspected for months – after haemorrhaging teams for a while, it is to shut down entirely, a decision which will see Blizzard (thus, ultimately, new owner Microsoft) paying out around $120 million to compensate the franchise teams. Some kind of alternative future for Overwatch as an esport is still being planned, but the lofty ambitions of the OWL are no more.
Overwatch itself has had some pretty well-documented problems in recent years – we’ll get to them – and those certainly played a role in the downfall of the OWL, but many of the biggest issues were unrelated to the game itself.
As in so many recent business failures, the pandemic played a role – it effectively derailed the plans for arenas in every city, which had been
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