The Overwatch League (OWL) just completed its first season, seeing a rise in viewership and the announcement of its new tank hero Ramattra. This season wasn’t perfect though, as there were criticisms about the stale meta. However, it was refreshing to see Blizzard invest so heavily into getting people to start watching.
To hype the season up and convince audiences to tune in, they offered prizes such as exclusive skins, sprays and gun buddies. Blizzard also launched a new exclusive store in the client where you earn tokens to spend on cosmetics only available in this shop. For every hour you watch the OWL, you’ll receive 5 tokens and an extra 100 tokens for every 30 hours watching. Each skin costs between 200-300 OWL tokens, with bundles costing 500.
Many have criticised Overwatch 2’s monetisation on launch, as skins can go up to $20 each, and without loot boxes, there are no alternative ways to receive skins without spending almost half the price of the original Overwatch, or through a controversial battle pass. The battle pass also gives some Overwatch gold coins, however only a crumb. After completing all the weekly challenges, you’ll only receive 50 Overwatch coins for your efforts, meaning it would take around 40 battle passes to be able to afford one skin.
For the OWL to hand out so many freebies shows a deliberate effort to make sure that audiences tune in and have a reason to stay around. If you’ve followed the OWL in the past, you could understand why.
Overwatch as a competitive sport didn’t start off too great. When the Overwatch League was announced in 2016 and set to launch the following year, due to unexpected circumstances, it was quickly delayed to 2018. Several orgs pulled out of Overwatch competitive scene entirely due to complications with the OWL, who would shut down other start-up competitions, and alongside having a rumoured 20 million dollar entry fee for teams.
When it debuted, it launched to huge numbers, garnering a consistent ten million viewers at launch, and had a prize pool of a million dollars for its first world tournament. Even DJ Khaled played at the Overwatch League Finals. This acclaim quickly deteriorated over the years, and before Overwatch 2 had launched, the Overwatch League was lucky to break into the five-figure range.
However, in its short stint in popularity, Overwatch managed to make its own space in the Esports scene. There was the infamous Shanghai Dragons, who in their first year, had a historic 0-40 series. That’s 0 games won, 40 lost. The only team ever in the history of sports to hold that statistic. They would eventually have an incredible comeback story, winning the world’s tournament in 2021.
Unfortunately, through the years that Overwatch’s weaknesses as an Esport became more apparent. Common criticisms were that the game is too ult-reliant, and heroes are too unbalanced to properly make into a fair Esport. The game also made for a rough viewing experience, as its fast-paced nature makes it incredibly difficult to follow along live.
So how did it slowly lose so much goodwill to where before OW2 launched, the OWL was lucky to garner 50k viewers? Depending on who you ask, it was a mix of two things. The first is Overwatch’s popularity declining over the years, making it harder to attract new viewers. The other (and probably most significant issue) was controversial decisions made by the OWL, which would strain audiences and pro players alike.
These decisions would include signing an exclusive streaming deal with Youtube in 2020, which at the time may have seemed lucrative, however, due to Youtube’s lack of stream integration into their site, ended up hurting the Overwatch League’s discoverability.
However, the largest issue with Overwatch’s popularity came when in 2020, when the wave of allegations against Activision Blizzard’s management came to light, and the state of California launched its lawsuit against the company. This lawsuit and countless public testimonies from employees recounting their experiences of abuse caused a wave of advertisers and sponsors to pull out of the league, leaving it underfunded.
Due to the league being underfunded, contracts for pro players became incredibly volatile. Organisations would draft up 30-day contracts for players and would give them the opportunity to terminate the contract if they found a player to be underperforming. This was intensely scrutinised as this would give pro players no job security, meaning if a player underperformed in a single game, they could immediately be fired. Organisations no longer had incentives to foster and nurture their teams over the long run, and teams wouldn’t have an opportunity to form any chemistry with one another.
There was also the more sinister implication in that many orgs would recruit players from overseas, sponsoring their visas and housing them. If they were suddenly fired, it would massively shake up that player’s livelihood and have massive implications on their financial status. In other words, these players were essentially kept hostage and at the mercy of these organisations.
This begs the big question: How did Blizzard reinvent their game as an Esport for OW2, and did they fix any of the major complaints?
The sad answer is not really.
A big issue I had with this OWL season was the lack of pick diversity. This most recent Overwatch League meta is the most stale it’s ever been. In nearly every game, we saw the same team comp picked on both sides. Each team would run Winston, Reaper, Sojourn, Kiriko and Lucio into each other. While there would be some minor deviations, like Junker Queen and Brigitte being picked very rarely, Lucio still had a 100 per cent pick rate through the series.
One-dimensional comps weren’t unusual back in the original Overwatch League also. In 2019, the dubbed “GOATS” meta was dominating. There was an infamous situation in a match between the New York Excelsior and the Houston Outlaws where the Outlaws ran a pick/dive comp, however upon seeing the Excelsior running a GOATS lineup, immediately ran back to spawn to switch to a mirror matchup.
This meta consisted of D.Va, Reinhardt, Zarya, Lucio, Brigitte and flex between Moira and Zenyatta, and fights would consist of each time steamrolling over each other to capture points, or butting heads for extended periods of time until ults were used. Hence “GOATS” due to their charging nature, and because it was so powerful.
This was only shaken when Sigma was released, however, this gave birth to the incredibly problematic shield meta. These issues were mostly fixed in OW2 as role queue was introduced, limiting how many tanks can be in a match. They also removed shields and stuns from the game to ensure these mechanics couldn’t be exploited. However, as one meta disappears, a new one props up to take its place.
I find the lack of pick diversity to be especially disappointing as compared to other Esports, and Overwatch has always been lacking in this balance department. For example, nearly every champion was picked in this Worlds season for League of Legends and last year, Dota 2 had 104 of its hero’s picked in the first two days of its tournament.
Because of the lack of counter-picks and incentives to experiment with team composition, we really didn’t get to see many explosive plays in this series. Every game essentially became “stall until Sojourn pops ult” and then win.
With the change to one tank instead of two, many pro players were terrified they were going to be cut from their team’s roster, and given those anti-worker contracts mentioned above, it’s fair to see why. The prize pool had been shrunk to half of what it used to be, and players’ wages were cut to be earning less than minimum wage.
Blizzard has thankfully announced new changes this month moving forward into the future that pro players will be signed to season long contracts, and the minimum salary will be $54,249 USD (previously it was under 50,000). Although 30 day contracts still do remain an option, orgs must have six players signed to a season-long contract to do so, and can only sign one player to a 30 day contract per season.
The grand final for this season of the OWL, according to Overwatch League head Sean Miller ended up breaking their all-time live global viewership record and many long-term fans were mostly happy with how the finals went down, stating that it has finally matured into its own thing.
There is still plenty to fix within the OWL, as casters have cited having issues with treatment in the OWL just this season on top of bugs being discovered and exploited at the OWL. However, Miller is still hopeful that we’ll see continued growth for the OWL in the near future, and with the Microsoft acquisition looming right around the corner, it may provide some vital funding, in the long run, to further boost the series prize pools and talent.
If you want to check out a concise recap of the highs and lows of Overwatch’s Esports history, Youtuber Kajor has an excellent video available detailing how Covid affected Overwatch and player contract disputes.
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