The Biggest Disaster in Esports History
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ม.ค. 2024
- When Overwatch was released on May 24, 2016, it was something new - a MOBA style hero shooter that rolled many of gaming’s favourite elements into one, mind-blowing offering.
The Overwatch League was supposed to be an extension of that - fans, players, and investors flocked to the scene, chasing glory, profits, and new opportunities.
The gargantuan, ambitious League that was supposed to change esports forever.
But instead, the biggest swing taken in the history of esports turned out to be a failure.
Hosted by: Dimitri Pascaluta (@DPascaluta)
Written by: Alina Sotula (@ASotula)
Edited by: Brendan Fahey (@Drillbit_)
Produced by: Alina Sotula, Matthew Massey (@matthewjmassey), Brendan Fahey, and Danielle Rosen (@_DanielleRosen)
Thumbnail by: Emmanuel Adarkwah
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Music used under license from Associated Production Music LLC (”APM”).
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The first six months of Overwatch is still one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Sad to see how it all unraveled.
agree, i loved the game at launch. Sadly each new character made it less enjoyable for me.
Holy shit Mark, crazy seeing you here! Not only do I love your work, but it's also incredible that we share that same gaming experience of that first era of Overwatch.. I'll always remember those memories from the months and first year playing Overwatch, as a freshman in high school (and I'm about to graduate college this spring)... it just made it all the more sad to see the falloff.
I recommend trying out more games
it really was....
I strongly disagree. I was left disappointed when i tried the game. Glad it's dead now tbh.
I remember downloading overwatch when it first came out and how amazing and new it felt. Slowly watching it become a money grab and watching it die out was really depressing
5v5 killed OW. it had a chance to be revived and they decided to monetize OW2 with a 5v5 ponzi scheme
To be fair, the game is not dead... it maybe bad for many people, but the player base is huuuge
It also didn’t slowly become a money grab, they did it instantly with ow2 release
it went from my favourite game to my biggest gaming dissapointment
@@K.a.t.-it1ps From what I have seen over the years it's probably a cesspool like League of Legends. On top of it supporting modern Blizzard in any way is dumb. There are tons of great games out there. Why kill your braincells and feed greedy company.
A Scot-Irish pub near me, now closed, had 3 screens playing sports from open to close. One behind the bar, one in the corner, and a big projector screen covering one wall. I'll never forget the time I went in there and they not only had Overwatch playing, but had it on the big screen.
All the old esports people knew instantly this was a sham, that the city based teams were a terrible idea. it did massive damage to sponsor opportunities for other esport games.
Agreed, they were blowing way too much money on these grand events but it didn't make anywhere close to recouping the cost. They hoped they hype train was enough to attract advertisers, but that's a coked up pipedream with a big dose of greed. If they had just let the esports scene develop naturally based on sustainable income, they would still have made a huge amount of money.
But the decline in good management manifests itself in many ways, and this is just one of them. Taking huge risks on longshots is the "in" thing for techbros nowadays.
Pretty much. Having been around watching the starcraft pro scene, I knew overwatch was going to fall on its face
@kitolz Based on what was going on in Blizzard, it was probably a mix of coke and neurosyphilis.
just follow the CS method... simple qualifiers in local regions... pretty simple.
I hate this because Call of Duty followed up with CDL (which is essentially this) and it sucks. Hell, ANZ doesnt have any players in the league, and EU doesnt have any city and barely some players
it's actually crazy how OWL had some of the best casters, desk staff, players, marketing, and base game to work with and none of them deserved how terrible the OW balance team, upper management at ABK treated them and the game. this league had immense potential and wasted potential is just so sad to see, especially at this scale
shit was dead before it even started they where no where near League numbers or dota 2 numbers lol....
@@HazardReapercool nerd
@@HazardReaperbruh were u there in 2016? overwatch was everywhere
@@pluff624It was everywhere, but it cannot do it like League, Dota 2, and CS. Those three just refuse to die despite their handicaps
I got skeptical back then when they said that OW were gonna follow the franchising model same to NBA or NFL and thought it's going to fail because I always thought they were overhyping it and expecting big, indeed it failed, notdirectly because of high expectations, because they clearly can deliver if they're just patient enough and consistent enough, but because of greed and mismanagement,
Then, few years later, games like LoL, Valorant, and even globally lesser known game called Mobile Legends started adapting the model and create a successful leagues, so OWL still had a legacy and influence across esports
One big thing for me as someone who played from the initial release is how I had paid full price for a game, only for it to be gone, and a bunch of things paywalled with what cheaply "replaces" the original game.
it made sense to go free to play, but it should have happened way sooner, and they should have given the og players who paid full price something else, like lots of credits and unique skins. overwatch2 was a mistake altogether
One thing I distinctly remember from the original release was that they promised all functional content would be free forever.
They kind of needed to. It was just another shooter but with a handful of characters, less than a dozen maps, etc. A question people familiar with shooters had was, "Why would I spend money on this tiny game with no content and lootboxes when I could just go back to tf2 / play dirty bomb for free / play gunz 2 for free / play paladins for free / get battleborn instead since it's from developers with a long track record of making shooters / [this list gets much larger if you include games that were playable AFTER overwatch]" and actiblizz's answer was "well you'll get all future functional content free."
But that kind of prevents them from charging an astronomical amount of money for a single pve map, doesn't it! So as a loophole to their promise/selling point, they *technically* just terminated the game and launched a different one which made no such promises instead. But you don't need to be a rocket scientist to connect the dots and realize they were just trying to go back on their promise/selling point.
Yeah, I wish I could still play the game that I paid 40 dollars for.
Live Service video games are fraud.
@@mariapaz6379They should have allowed people to still play Overwatch 1
The toughest moment for me was with the fiasco with the player getting penalized harshly for stating a political slogan due to Chinese politics. Then firing the casters who just happened to be there. The good vibes left me there.
That happened in Hearthstone too. Activision is soulless.
I don't remember that happening in the OWL.The Free Hong Kong guy was an Hearthstone player.
That was the beginning of the end. Everything started unraveling after that shitshow.
not blizz's fault for their bad opinions
That was the precursor to what was to come with that lawsuit
I just wanted to reiterate how important it was that they had GOOD ANNOUNCERS. Its hard enough to watch some of these NHL and NFL games with crap announces, but OWL did it right 👍
you mean casters?
They weren’t just good announcers. They were passionate.
@@millionelectricvolts6117 yah. Words are hard
Montecristo and DoA were/are some of the best caster duos in the industry.
That aged well a week after new ow esports announcement they laid off the casters from old owl
the people crying at the end was really heartbreaking. bad organizational culture and bad management can be truly devastating.
Well i bet lots of Blizzard employees felt a bit better when OW failed, knowing how they were shafted again and again and again.
Wow, so heartbreaking these people couldn't make celebrity livings playing an uninteresting videogame. Maybe dedicating your life to a shooting game wasn't the best idea to begin with? It's just not interesting to watch.
@@michaelrapaport4494 the game was actually good, but after goats devs just didn't/couldn't balance it properly to make it more interesting to watch and play. Also, I was mainly talking about workers. Dedicate life to a shooting game? It's a product, working on a product to make a profit is not dedicating the life to it, but expectations were built and experiences lived.
Damn who shit in your cereal this morning @@michaelrapaport4494
Damn, I wish you luck when you experience real struggles.....
Man, seeing the casters crying at the end as they do a final round of applause for the OWL made me tear up. The people involved in this really did deserve so much better.
When they realized that their big easy money would stop, so their super-easy comfortable life course they cried. lol
@@artmanrom you think they just cast? sad and ignorant
What killed Overwatch league for me was having teams full of Korean players playing for teams that were supposed to be from US and EU.
Take full team of people from a different continent and call it a home team.
Also the whole league structure was really inorganic.
Remember how in 2018 Riot had their finals in a stadium with live performance and AR characters on stage while the Overwatch League had DJ Khaled in a studio. All while Blizzard had potentially more budget for said event.
No matter how good a game is, being handled by the wrong hands will always result in enshittification
The other thing about OWL is that before OWL was ever a thing, there were some pro scenes that threw tournaments and etc. But, when OWL came around, Blizzard essentially went, "Nope. You're not allowed to host tournaments if they aren't sanctioned by us," or something along those lines. So, these pro scenes stopped hosting Overwatch altogether for years. And now that OWL is over, plus the decline of interest in esports in general, no one is picking it back up.
21:08 "Its like cutting out a shortstop in baseball" holy fuck, that's a great comparison to the dumb decision of losing a tank in OW2
Right? I kept hearing people refer to it as being like an esports version of The NFL - just imagine what would happen if The NFL announced one day that football was being discontinued in favour of Football2?
The sheer arrogance of the executives and the managers, to imagine that they could dictate huge, sweeping, unpopular changes to the game and the league, and that the fans, the players, and everyone else involved would just shut up, do what they were told, keep on playing and keep on generating money? It's utterly absurd.
How could any of them have deluded themselves into thinking that it was a good idea?
With *_any_* other sport, the backlash, the anger and the eventual failure would be forgone conclusions. Just try and imagine: "New Golf(™️)" "Baseball II(™️)" "Football Turbo(™️)" The fans would riot the moment it was announced.
Total insanity.
Nah it was more like cutting out one striker from a football (soccer) team
Paints a wrong picture, it isn't a dumb decision, skillcap is higher now, new projectile changes are making the game fresh again.
@@Scorpio789123 You mean how you guys are tossing around boulders?🤣 The projectiles are huge now, the skill floor went up, skill ceiling went down. Sad but true, I stuck around for a while hoping for better changes, but heroes being behind a paywall is unacceptable.
I’ll wait for 6v6, if they don’t bring it back i’ll gladly leave this game buried. The mindless newcomers can have some fun with it, i’ll play some Spelunky with my buds B)
@@Scorpio789123 na i have played it and it feels so much worse than before, its actually boring not even frustrating but straight up boring to play
I loved this game so much. It really breaks my heart to see how it's all fallen apart, and how they let all the fans down.
also the people that bought the first game, cant play it anymore and i paid for the game, horrible company
Warcraft and Starcraft fans are suffering with you... fuck modern Blizzard
Yeah. I actually have a physical copy of OW (2016), but I don’t see the point in owning it anymore since Blizzard put it down like an animal.
Shame, I never get a chance to play it have not blizzard put it down
Welcome to Activision. They destroy everything they touch, and they know their rabid fanbase will never learn
the whole selling point of OW2 was "this is OW1 BUT it comes with a storyline campaign" it would carry over cosmetics and all that stuff, so people were hyped, blizzard fumbled so hard that their only real change is turning a 6v6 game to 5v5 and do some balance changes
you forget the shop update
@@billcipher1756 leave it to Activision/Blizzard to make loot boxes a BETTER option
I feel like one of the bigger topics about the scene going under that isn't ever talked about enough is the personalities in the inaugural season. half of the original roster were all streamers, that allowed the fans to form a more personal relationship the their favorite players on the teams they liked to watch play. And even if you didn't like watching them or the league games live, channels like fresh nuts brought that content to a youtube audience. Something i felt was really unique to esports was that connection you could get with individual players, and from that esoteric terms, mindsets, memes almost a whole culture could grow around one player that could spread into the whole game. Truly i feel like with enough time i could name around 70-60% of the original rosters of the inaugural season where i couldn't say shit about the seasons afterwards other than big names like flower, soon, poko, and sinatra.
THIS
In the last few seasons I’d poke my head into whatever owl was up to and just see teams full of people I didn’t even recognize so I didn’t care about the matches.
Utter nonsense. Competitive games were thriving long before streamers were even a thing. Just look at Counter-Strike, WoW Arena, DOTA, and countless others.
but these guys have been in for the fun and the audience, not for the money and the competition
the hardcore e-sport players are usually no memesters with the time to hang out online with their fanbase
@@jaybeam1466sure, but the issue is how the genesis of the OWL happened
there are tons of old backups of Overwatch from 2016-2018 on the internet, some group of people should just crack it and host private servers tbh
That would actually be awesome
That would be awesome. How that would not be struck down by Blizzard idk but then again tf2classic exists so maybe they can do it.
Blizzard actually enacted the villain's plot of "Free Guy"
Yeah, I thought the same thing.
You reckon the movie writers had this in mind?
@@stickiedmin6508 The writers thought of shitty (tech) megacorpos in general
I went to the inaugural championship when I was like 14 and I still remember how electric of an atmosphere it was. Such a shame to see it go
I was shown to overwatch by my cousin, even tho I didn’t have a computer at the time it looked cool
I never followed Overwatch, but seeing this documentary made me feel sad about what could have been
Same. I only played here and there as my dad got it for my younger brother. It does leave a sad feeling.
It was never meant to be. ESports should have been organically grown, rather than try to go big too quickly through OWL.
@@triadwarfare Agreed OW was great but OWL was dead on arrival imho. You just can't force an Esport like that. Blizzard should have known that, since the success from Starcraft was more of an "happy accident" than everything.
pls dont play
the feeling of greatness that slowly gets abandoned is real
blizzard dont care to OW other than money
its NEVER been their golden child
its WOW and they couldnt care everything else
@3takoyakis Overwatch and Diablo make way more money every year than WoW did at its peak. The cash grab worked my dude. OWL might be dead, but Overwatch the game is everything but. And the player base keeps growing. What's probably going to happen is that the vocal OW1 fan base is probably slowly going to die out, and the new player base that never even knew how it used to be will start to rise up. And my guess is, this is what blizzard is slowly waiting for before announcing a new league with a probably better approach. But time will tell.
"Over Watch was made with esports mind" I don't know about that one, everything and the close betas before launch kinda says the opposite and it feels more like that's just what Blizzard forces on things
Yeah, the game is one of the more notorious examples of having an e-sports scene forced upon it and not letting one evolve naturally.
@@planescaped Making a game around esports isn't really a problem IMHO. BUT they need to also balance the game around esports and listen to feedback to make changes constantly. Its a problem a ton of esports games have. The problem with not creating it around esports is look at the The Finals. The Devs even came out and said they weren't trying to make it an esport right away it was meant for fun. The game is fun and they are making amazing changes to fix issues. Problem is without the esports scene to boost player counts and viewers it is now slowly dying out. Its barely even relevant at the moment on twitch.
Yeah from the admittedly limited knowledge I have it seems that they tried to make it more and more competitive throughout the game's lifespan and in doing so made it boring and bland
2016-2018 overwatch was the best time of the game. I remember playing the beta with my friends and we were hooked instantly. Loved that game when it was fun and enjoyable.
You know what happened in 2018? Brigitte happened, that's about when everyone stopped playing
@@zingy1811 fucking goats comp... such cancer in ladder.
Remember when Overwatch League was on DisneyXD 💀
Ong I remember I didn't even care for the game but I was rooting for that success 😮💨 maybe in another timeline
International travel during a regular season is such a logistical nightmare but would’ve been so cool. Tbh I think overwatch shouldve looked at riot’s format of region locked regular season and 2-3 international events per year
Thats what I was thinking, glad someone said it. Kind of like how soccer leagues do it. There's the local leagues/schedule/championship, then international/worldwide ones. Probably would've allowed them to slowly build over time.
NFL does it just for a couple games a year. NHL and NBA, MLB all of canadian teams that played in regular season.
In the NFL if your team gets assigned to play a game in Europe the next week you are on an bye week.
Exactly why the direction corrupt institutions like UEFA and FIFA want to take football in is a disaster waiting to happen
plus they place a freakton of emphasis on the Cisco connection thing like that's how you know Riot is backing up their ambition with actual big moves for the better.
@@tcbobb1613NHL plays in europe and australia now
This is the kind of crap that happens when companies get too big and officially become "corporate". It happens EVERY. DAMN. TIME.
At what point does a company become a corporation, definition-wise?
@@eeyorehaferbock7870 Usually when they get funding from people who earn a living from other people's work.
@@RicardoSantos-oz3ujexactly what i was saying. Venture capital is a boon that inevitably becomes a cancer
@@eeyorehaferbock7870 They become a corporation when they register as one. Lol.
@@treehann what even is venture capital? Seriously, the term “venture capitalist” has been funny to me because it sounds like “adventure capitalist”, which was the term that the villain from Atlantis: The Lost Empire used to refer to himself as a nicer-sounding alternative to “mercenary”. Probably because I originally saw it being used to refer to people like Jeffery Sachs who are outright scumbags on the level of that character.
Soe's speech at the finals made me cry. She made everyone cry. It was something else, being there...
It hurts just to read. I haven't watched since 2019, but it still hurts.
Overwatch history made me realize what seeing david kill goliath would've felt like. Cause this game was the promised land, nothing could go wrong, we had years of never ending fun ahead of us and then the league, brigitte aand that's it.
5v5 killed the greatest game ever
@@mortystraphouse5077 if you really thing 5v5 killed it then you paid no attention to list of things before it.
@@chpgmr1372 5v5 for me killed the game aswell, its just boring right now and way more fast paced. Tryed on OW2 release for a couple of weeks and quit once and forall.
@@mortystraphouse5077I didn’t know bobby kotick’s name was 5v5
downhill started Ana's release, right then and there you could tell how unqualified the team was at balancing with beyblade+ambulance (quad tank+reaper+ana) meta just because they thought it was a great idea to add hero that heals 14x more than the 2nd highest healer and 4x times more the utility, baffling brain rot
I went to the Dallas home game and it was an insane experience. The crowd was never quiet, the hype was insane, every team was celebrated (except the one playing against Dallas lol). Then COVID happened
Yeah, as much as it's blizzards fault for the game going in a wrong direction, covid absolutely did kill all momentum OWL had left.
American loud crowds is sleeping for the rest of the world. I literally would donate money for Americans to get to experience a real crowd cause I feel so bad for yall.
@@zo7034 yeah but then you gotta smell europoors and see their teeth
lol over watch just wasn't good. cuz Dota and league did okay during covid snd survived
@@christophermauro-barias7451 Dota and LoL werent at the time going all in on a league model that fundamentally does not work during a lockdown...
Imagine if instead of trying to force an e-sport they put those resources into making a good game and keeping their promises like, I dunno...PvE mode.
Same thing with smash ultimate. Had potential
@@YunaCrawfordsmash ultimate is still an extremely fun game even without DLC one of my friends has well over 700 hours put into the game its a blast to play against him.
@@youtubestuff683 oh I meant tournament scene as a whole.
@@YunaCrawford ah
One thing i couldn't understand was the team names being things like "Houston ___", "Boston ____" , "Miami ____" but a majority of them weren't even from that area? I get that's how some sports teams function but what's the point rooting for your home team if they're not even from your region?
NFL works like this. Most of the teams consist of players who are from very different regions and all went to school in different places. Still one of the most popular things on American TV. So the format could have worked but I think Overwatch by itself was to ambitious. If they made the teams like Miami Esports etc etc then maybe it could have worked. Like Miami Esports and they have a team for CS, LOL, and Overwatch. Maybe that could have worked cause a person could then cheer for the team repping their city much like NFL across multiple platforms. Idk maybe not who knows.
@@mattyeye8176 true, I understand for a sports team, but for games though it feels so weird, it's almost seems fake like why would you even bother to cheer or root for them if their name has nothing to do with your region?
@@Arcademan09 I definitely see your point. Like in CS cheering for C9 when they picked up a mostly EU roster felt weird compared when they had an all NA roster. So I can relate but if its city related they are still representing your city. Remember though its not so much people who already watch esports they were trying to get into watching it was people who arent into it. They wanted to make it easy for people to get behind a team.
Every single team sport in the entire world is like that. It's not an esport issue, that's just the way sports are.
@@TomCruz54321 cool except this isn't a real sport so what's the point? *Again* as soon as I realized that none of the players are actually from the region I immediately stopped caring, what the hell is the point of me cheering a team from California if none of the players are from my home state? Actual sports are one thing but this seemed like a really dumb idea for videogames. I understand but at the same time I don't understand, it's weird
Should have let the esports emerge naturally and just focus on fun. Each hero could work in a stand alone game. Crazy Lucio wall ride maps should be a game mode. They didn’t even try.
Problem is that blizzard is so bad at balance. Its quite impressive
@@alltidtratt3564they weren't in the past...
Asking much of the company that through over-focusing on esports killed SC2 and nearly the whole RTS genre
There are Custom games for wall ride and parkour stuff.
Aside from that, yeah, we already had Apex Tournaments which would have been BIG if Blizzard didnt kill it
wouldn't really have changed anything, the infrastructure was a great idea and it's honestly absolutely necessary for the next level
whether or not the esport scene grew naturally, it doesn't change all the shit decisions blizzard has done, they would've done them with or without the esport scene
It is an incredible story that i think only theScore is able to tell properly. A tale of hubris and history colliding with greed and reality. Blizzard turned from a construct of passion and value into a vampire of it's own legacy, a transformation started by Tencent and finished by Activision. Even the old guards sins , it wasn't just the scandal but the lukewarm reaction to it that made sponsors and decent people distance themselves from blizzard ips. The erasure of Overwatch 1 as a product means all that's left are memories and stories like this. Thanks for doing it justice.
if you checking twitter, you would see tons of paid-content creator defending it. When steam got hit so bad, tons of them defending it. Turns out blizz make a gathering of content creator before steam release to smooth up steam release which they already know would be disastrous
It is such a disappointment, I wish I could get back into the game, but they ruined all the fun heroes, they ruined mccrees abilities, symmetras original abilites, just why.... STOP CHANGING OLD HEROES AND MAKE A COUNTER FOR THEM INSTEAD
blizzard went from the greatest to the worst and most evil gaming company of all time, from top quality games, made with passion and love, that changed gaming forever to a library of predatory gatcha games.
If you want an unfiltered look at the entirety of OWL, watch The Four Horsemen podcast episode on it. It's told by the 3 hosts: MonteCristo -- DoA's (one of the interviewees in this video) long-time casting partner in League of Legends and one of the initial architects of OWL, Richard Lewis -- the best esports journalist who broke multiple scandals about corporate corruption and malpractice including a couple involved with Blizzard/OWL, Thorin -- some old guy who's been with esports forever, and Harsha -- former OWL coach.
They paint a far less rosy picture of OWL from conception to demise.
I remember one of the things I loved about Overwatch when it just released was that matchmaking was practically instant. Now it takes forever to find a game.
Thats because so many people (me included) saw the store at launch and that it was just overwatch 1 but with more microtransactions, were like "F that, gonna wait a bit" then they were like "oh yea we lied there is going to be no story mode" so a lot more people were like "Yep f Blizzard" its why they wanted to release it onto Steam as well because so many people have quit playing the game. I will never touch Overwatch ever again. Loved the lore and characters, just can't support the company only Blizzard games I play anymore is the Starcraft games, and Diablo 3. Unfortunately their greed has ruined them beyond recovery.
OWL was dead on arrival. Most people were just too blind to see it and Activision Blizzard too dedicated to the lie. But industry veterans knew since the beginning. There is a video called "Richard Lewis on Overwatch League" from six years ago in which he describes exactly how it would eventually fail.
True
How different would activision be if Bobby hadn't been ceo?
Would overwatch2 be an actual sequel and not just a cash-grab scheme, and maybe overwatch league would have turned out differently
It definitely could have been how large it was touted to be
You mean, how different would Blizzard be* not Activision.
@@ofsoundmind28 I was wondering if there was any difference
Overwatch 2 would never've been a thing, the license was never meant to have a sequel
I don't think Bobby was inherently the problem, I do think he is a problem, but there are other managers involved who made horrible decisions.
It was crazy to see OWL so quickly eat its own tail with corporate greed. They were so quick to turn esports into the NFL and I was so confused why they wouldn’t let the competitive scene develop on its own for a while. Then i saw how it was fun by a bunch of dude bros and it all made sense rip.
"Corporate greed" was not the failure point lol. It was a series of bad business decisions and poor leadership that eventually led to a failed project. We can see that this is the case because significantly more money would've been made had the league actually established itself like it was trying to. After all, blizzard is not a charity and businesses exist to make money. I find it funny that when businesses fail at something, it's attributed to the same cliché "corporate greed" that's also blamed for their success. It would seem that the people are the problem here.
@@deuscoromat742 cope harder these decisions were made with the intention of milking more money
blizzard has ALWAYS done this btw, starcraft, WoW pvp, hearthstone, all had organic organized play scenes, only to be shut down and superseded by the inferior big budget blizzard ones. I blame Bobby, if not personally, than through culture he set.
@@deuscoromat742 It also didn't help that Blizzard was being very slow in addressing balance issues. I.E. it took Blizzard forever to finally nerf the GOATS meta and that did massive damage to the E-Sports scene.
Because they wanted to dethrone LOL the biggest esport game
I'm still mad that Kotick got out with that massive freakin parachute. He's out but how many of his bros are still in Blizz?
I've never seen a company self-destruct harder. What I want more than ANYTHING is for Blizzard to know that COVID didn't kill their game, THEY did.
Couple of things to add:
1. OWL was a single-country league, effectively. Korea completely dominated to the point where in season 2, many western teams picked up Korean players. This took away a lot of the international appeal.
2. The pro meta influenced the balancing of the game more than the meta of the player base. In other words: Balance sucked for regular people - some people developed a dislike for OWL because of that.
3. Tracer made it unwatchable for some people. She wasn't in the meta for season 1, but with season 2, the jerky camera movement from her POV was pretty unsettling to some.
4. Because they never leaned into the MOBA side of things (meaning drafts, bans, etc), the strategic component of team compositions was always really shallow. When you look at Dota/LoL, those games have massively dedicated fanbases who are invested because of the intricacies of this kind of system. Depth leads to longevity.
You know the 1st and 2nd point kinda apply to LoL too
It was also very hard to punish a good tracer as well. She just had too much mobility and a get out of trouble card to punish her. Mobility in online games is always very strong but particularly in tracer's case given she had s between her time jumps and rewind. Overwatch has a series of bad design decisions. Genji restoring dash on kill made nano-blade extremely OP in most metas, widowmaker receiving an increasing headshot multiplier as her shot charged made here powerful when she's hitting her shots and removes a lot of counterplayer the other team might otherwise had. That's before considering any of the insanely overpowered new heroes they released starting from brig onwards. Each one of those heroes broke the game to where they balanced literally the entire game around those new heroes instead of balancing the hero to fit into the game.
Pros like everything homogenized, reliable, and consistent. Casual players tend better towards uniqueness, and the wild moments that come from swingy mechanics and gameplay.
This was not going to hold.
koreans are S tier humans, they will always be the best gamers
I follow e sports, but mostly fighting games and a bit of StarCraft. I liked OW as a game to play but i think Blizzard understimated how hard is to keep a fanbase. I'll ellaborate.
Look, one game i don't watch anymore Is melee, why? Is stale as hell, the scene and players are there but although There's a shake up every 4 or 5 years the truth Is that the game at competitive level Is just a bunch of foxes against other foxes, and sure those guys are amazing players but in basketball if EVERYONE starts to hop 3 point baskets then for sure is a great skill but becomes boring for the fans.
At this point you must understand that the changes in a competitive game are NOT for balancing purposes but to make the game More enjoyable for the viewers. Those guys Making 3 pointers over and over will need to practice More for next season when the NBA decides to further the 3 point line 1 meter more later.
Now, how this relates to the fans and players? There's a delicate balance here, exciting matches are of course great for the viewers, they will watch every game expecting the unexpected but comes with the price of screwing the players who learn the meta for a long time and base training and strategies on It just to learn new stuff later that wasn't there last week. Blizzard ultimately decided that It was too much of a headache to balance all this and let the game roam with the same stuff (that were viable but stale strategies) and the audience suddenly was watching Tracer handing everyone's ass every game.
I bought a PS4 solely to play Overwatch. I later bought my first gaming PC, again, solely to play Overwatch. I watched so many hours of matches (primarily the Dallas Fuel and Atlanta Reign) and had so many in game OWL skins. Overwatch was *the* game that I played. Now I pop in once every couple months, play a match or two, and remember why I don't play it anymore. I literally met my wife because of Overwatch. It's so sad to see what was such a big part of my life rot away like that.
Sometimes I'll fire up an old Overwatch League stream from the 2010s, when it was sold-out crowds watching gaming's biggest personalities still experimenting with new strategies and player combinations to eek an advantage over the other. There was so much wonder and spectacle, and the crowd was explosive. I yearned to attend a live match whenever I could but my work schedule sadly prevented me. It was all we talked about at the office, we had our team banners in our cubicles, we cheered and jeered our wins and losses, and the muffled gasps and fist pumps would creep through our workspace as a team would miraculously will absolute clutch in overtime. It was the most excited I ever was for any sporting event, and thought Overwatch League had captured lightning in a bottle.
Those streams are still worth watching. If somebody has never watched a single match, I recommend they find the old VODs and check it out. There was never anything like it before, and probably never will again.
This is such a well done story on the rise and fall of OWL told in a succinct, yet comprehensive manner. You can really tell theScore put their all into the research and production of this story. I hope this video performs well as I'd love to see more content like this from the channel!
I stuck it out with this game as a casual for five years as the friends I started playing with fell off one by one, up until random heroes arcade became queue hell.
The idea to make the game 5v5 was pretty much what made me shelf it.
What's so bad about 5v5?
@@ahhmm5381 Well, fewer players just means less variation in matches, less shenanigans. At least to me that's how I felt.
Plus buffing the tank to become a pseudo dps wrecked the whole role-playing dynamic of the game.
It was more of a player personality problem than anything, in my opinion. But the devs only probably thought of catering to the minority elite players in stead of realizing that the more people they could convince to play flex, the balance of game queue would just follow from there.
I mean their software can track every small stat of every hero. Why not use that to motivate players with disproportionate category picks so that they would eventually enjoy playing flex maybe through some kind of reward system?
Dang it I've been rambling. lol
I thought 5v5 was an improvement honestly
Been playing OW since it released. I don't blame you for leaving at 5v5, Tank synergies were one of my favorite parts of the game. Some of my favorite memories are playing Zarya with my Rein main friend, and just going nuts on King's Row attack (Even though I'm a Mercy main).
I played my first OW match in 5 months yesterday. The pay to win really felt brutal, not having the two newest healers and the new tank was a little frustrating. While me and my two buddies still had fun, we probably would have had more fun with a different game, we just liked hanging out.
@@ahhmm5381 A lot is bad about 5v5. First is that anyone who liked playing off-tank couldn't anymore. They completed shafted every off-tank player. In addition they had to re-balance the entire game and maps around 5v5, which wasted a ton of time and completely changed the feel of the game. People played overwatch because it's overwatch, 5v5 just feels like another TDM shooter. 5v5 in addition to the other changes just make OW into another generic shooter.
🦀Bobby Kotick is gone🦀
(He forced the OWL, diverted resources form the team, made them announce Overwatch 2 way too early, didn't give the team enough resources to work on two games. Not to mention the sexual assault lawsuit and the shift from full quality experience to hypermonetizing everything at the expense of said quality).
I really hope MS leadership can make OW fun again but my faith in the devs, current leadership other than bobby etc. are at an all time low. I think it may be a lost cause :(
i really hope that this will change things, i doubt we will see changes any time soon, it will probably take some months if not a year, but i really hope something will change and overwatch and all the other blizzard games will shine again
The enshittification is permanent and baked in, I fear
I loved overwatch so much. That first trailer, i was already hooked. I remember the first day it launched. That first year was magic. I have met many friends from overwatch, and we all ended up moving in together and are still close friends. I spent hours grinding, getting better and better each day to reach masters (i never did sadly. Made it to mid diamond though so ill take it). Hell, even my boss would watch OWL with me and a few others at work. We would gather at buffalo wild wings and they would put it on for us. I got to witness an old man who never played a video game in his life watch it, and was entertained. I got to show him all the shorts of the characters(he loved reinhardts the most). Oh man, the shorts. Those were so good. The hype while waiting for the new character movie shorts was something else.....i miss those days. I truly do. Ive never simultaneously loved and hated a game at the same time before overwatch. Its just so depressing to see what became of it, all because of sh*tty people and greed.
The big thing I think this shows is that the game developer for the game that becomes an E-Sport should not have control of the E-Sport scene. Also, if game developers are going with the desire to make a game an E-Sport then they sure as hell better to fast on balancing the game if something like the GOATs comp comes along and makes the game boring to watch.
Rest in Peace OW, gone too soon. I will forever look back at 2016-2018 with a fondness in my heart for a game, that has yet to refound. Cheers mates!
I would recommend checking out The Finals. It reminds me a lot of how fun Overwatch was.
@@sugarfree_ too bad they don't want to pay voice actors and use AI
A toast, to a lost cause...
2016-2018 peak Overwatch
@@yummyapplestroodle Voice actors suck. You just gave The Finals a selling point to me
When OWL started it was crazy hype, I really enjoyed watching it. When the GOATS meta came in and Blizzard refused to address it for an entire year that was the first nail in the coffin. It was both horrible to play against and horrible to watch professionally.
I didn't hate watching goats, for me the expectations that they could sequel jump after two years is insane. Dota 2 may have evolved, but it's still the same title decade later. They should have followed that model, just gradually incrementing.
imo the biggest issue with GOATs was how long it lasted. i enjoyed playing it, i enjoyed watching it. but it became too repetitious
@@sldarwin5615 But if you watch a balanced team play a balanced team, it's way funner for everyone. It did ruin it. Watching an NBA team of centers just dunk would kill basketball as well.
(Not that watching a bunch of shaq's dunking on each other repeatedly wouldn't be fun to watch)
it woulda been fine if goats only lasted 1-2 months but the fact they ddint adress the main problem brig for that long is what started killing the game an insanely broken hero
The “Marry go round” play was legendary.. I remember watching it and losing my mind
Oh my god! Thanks for reminding me of that one. Just rewatched it and I can completely connect with the feelings I had when I saw it live. Fuck the first 2 seasons of OWL were soooo hype! So many streamers turned pro you could root for and everything
8:00 such a throwback seeing younger xqc
Before the excessive brainrot
@@AB-bx5tohuh did you not actually watch him back then he's pretty much always been the same he just wears expensive clothes and jewelry now
@@AB-bx5to He was originally known as "that Overwatch player that got banned for prolific slur usage."
Dude has been brain rotted since day 1. How he became so popular is something I will never understand.
@@AB-bx5to he was worst back then lmfao, he actually grew up alot
@haruhirogrimgar6047 prolific slur usage is nuts bro. Nothing he said was all that bad, people were heavily on his side for how the League dealt with him
Overwatch is the story of the biggest miss management in history
And rich people who owns it doesn't care I hate them so much
@@lordmordekaiser3366they don't even seem to care about money they're making. It was stupid
In esports yes... In Gaming, probably. In history? No... You havent heard about the "great leap forward" I guess...
Star Wars.
@@Joyexer he definitely think nothing happened in Tiananmen Square 1989
Honestly love seeing a return to form on this documentary style videos and highlighting what we care about as fans, keep up the good work guys
I got chills watching that quick Pine 4k on Junkertown. The Nostalgia.
You can never force E sports growth artificially
Overwatch never did that... Just what people who know nothing about the game say.
@@Bievahh lol.. it literally came from their mouth.. 🙄🙄
@@latibro21 whoever said it is flat out wrong. There was OW esports for years before OWL started
@@Bievahhyou aren't wrong. APEX existed before OWL. However, the talk of OWL or similar format was brought up in 2016 blizzcon not even half year after the game came out, so I don't think many are wrong to say that they already had esports in mind or wanted to grow it out artificially.
@@Bievahhbro owl was the least organic esports in the history of esports. After valorant now
Man, those clips of the first season gave me so much nostalgia.
Up to this day, I still call the gunslinger guy as McCree.
It was always weird to me that other games at the same level of popularity or even more successful had cheaper cosmetics, were developing new things faster and don't tell me it was worth the wait because the quality of OW updates isn't different than in other games. They also had bugs. Updates on Blizzard games are so rare that I almost forgot about them. I have to admit that story line and characters were really lovely. I was hoping for a movie. It feels like someone responsible there doesn't have knowledge about the market and they have to focus more on the community. Without people they don't exist.
As a former top 500 from 2016-2017, early OW will always hold some of my fondest gaming memories of all time. My biggest regret is deleting my oldest clips out of desperation to make room for storage.
Peaked at 4200 here, I wish I had some of my off tank clips. I loved OW so much.
It'd still be the best shooter IMO if the game was still in that state.
TH-cam existed…
The city model was never ever going to work, because it was too sterile and fake. The idea of anyone supporting say London Spitfire because they live in London was just laughable in the first place, because there was never a local scene, or even a real continental scene because they shuttered all the independent tournaments far too early. Viewers were basically just funneled to a massive event, where the personalities of the players were never really shown off. There was no real reason to support any of the teams after the first season or 2, all the names disappeared. The lack of actual team leaders, since the lineups were controlled from the top, rather than original teams who became sponsored, meant you never really even got "cores" of teams. You compare that to counter strike where teams were often 1 or 2 players replaced at once, and you'd see the same groups appearing in other lineups. The lack of any real consistency made it hard to support a particular team at all. A lot of bad decisions and unfortunate circumstances did kill off OWL, but the fact was from season to season the only thing that remained the same about the teams was the colours. No team legacy or player stories/rivalries or recognisable players for the most part...
As someone who has loved this game since its second year when I began playing, I was worried this would be yet another video stomping on the game and the eSport for attention, but I really felt this was a strong tribute to the potential the game and eSports League had that never was able to be realized. I really appreciate the work put into telling this story.
This game just sucks
As someone who loved the game when it was in beta, it has fallen a long way down and its reputation is well deserved
@@fernandocardenas740 tell me you are bad at the game without telling me you are bad at the game
@@vendettyrontell me you’re delusional without telling me you’re delusional
@@trini1711 xd
Overwatch esports was so amazing like I’ve only been playing overwatch for like a year but when I found out about owl I went back and watched a lot of the matches and they are so exciting and watching players way better than you play the game really motivates you to play and it’s so sad that owl died😢
I used to be a huge Seoul dynasty fan, ryujehong fan actually. He inspired me a lot, I miss those times so much sometimes tbh. Players and casters deserved much more…
Remember when xqc was an overwatch league pro?
Was he a goblin back then too?
Wild
@@grimoireweiss5203asking real questiin here 😂
@@grimoireweiss5203 yes.
The main issue with making an E-sport into a sports league rival is the scarcity disparity.
If you want to watch high level [insert video game here], you can turn on twitch and see someone either pro or near pro playing 24/7.
If you want to watch high level football or American football or tennis or whatever, you're very limited. Matches happen in seasons outside of which there isn't any and you only get like 60 matches a year or whatever.
Sure, there's re-runs or whatever but when you know who's gonna win, so much of the excitement is removed.
I remember being in high school and saving up my allowance for overwatch in 2016 and I fell in love with the game from the start and I still love it, I still play it but when OWL Esports was coming and watching it I felt so happy to watch the pros play my favorite game but it’s sad to see it decline and not be the league we were all hoping for.
I think that baseball analogy is spot on - you don’t see other sports just cutting an entire position… making even small changes in any sport is controversial - removing an entire player is like suicide in the sports space
Cheers to the talent team. Puckett, Reinforce, Doa...Positive forces in the community that made all the potential feel genuinely within reach.
We need something new, honest, and hopeful now.
Modern Blizz and honesty don’t go in the same sentence sadly
This brought me back to the good old times. It's so painful to compare it with now. I remember how I hyped I was. Watched every match of the first season :c
they promised so much not just in the gameplay, but in the story to be told too, with the cinematics, the comics, the events, the voice lines etc. and they all just.. died too.
24:16 "In an alternate timeline..." TIL Wong from Dr. Strange is real and moonlights as an OW commentator
Original overwatch league and overwatch world cup was some of the best Esports I've ever watched. It's saddening to know we'll never have that back.
Season 1 and part of 2 were so fun. Overwatch has shown how execs can kill all trust a community has built around a game. The only ones that suffer are the ones that have the least control to change things.
Except the ranked system then was the worst I have ever seen
@@MT-so2mk yeah it was bad but the game itself and the people playing it was fun everyone was learning the game and honestly it was more about how well will you deal with all the egos in the team and get a team cohesion than only skills which made the game so much more fun like a team of worst player could win because they played together and the enemy team imploded from too much ego.
Actually the biggest problem with people is that they overhype everything far too quickly and expecting everything to be amazing, and clearly it's not, and they just paid the price for it
The saddest thing about this is that it could still make a comeback, and Blizzard just isn't making an effort at reviving a game that was amazing and can still be amazing.
Blizzard and fumbling your own Esport. Name a more iconic duo.
Amazing video y'all. Its insane how much really happened with overwatch over the years. I remember loving OW1 and even near the end of OW1 I still had love for it but had high hopes for OW2 but it just didn't stick the way I hoped it would. The announcement of PVE being dropped was the last straw for me and I dropped the game completely and walked away. I'd only come back if they turned OW1 back on so we could play that again.
Whoever put Bobby’s face right after they were talking about how corrupt blizzard is I LOVE YOU
who couldve foreseen that artificially built worldwise competitive scene of a brand new game with a system that literally is only used in the US would go wrong......
Overwatch captured lighting in a bottle and it slowly turned into a fart in a jar.
Yeah. I don't know know what happened behind the scenes, but the swap from Twitch to TH-cam was so left-field and we also lost a bunch of features that Twitch had that TH-cam didn't. Namely, being able to watch the match from your favorite player's point of view if you subscribed to the main channel.
Damn, been following theScore's content for quite some time but this was top notch and a huge step-up from previous content (which I also liked).
I never played nor watched an Overwatch match (although have worked in the world of e-sports) yet I was invested during this vid from beginning to the end.
Although Owl may not have it's story as people expected from it. Eventually you'll need a bunch of failures before someone learns from them and raise e-sports to the global level we can all imagine it to be.
Thanks for the enjoyable vid!
The first two seasons of OWL was great, there were watch parties at my local bar in San Francisco and they had people from the team stop by and do merch giveaways. It was always so packed watching it in the bar. I even went down to LA to watch a couple matches with friends. But i had to move away from SF and i was stuck watching it at home. It never felt the same.
Watching sports in a public place with all the strangers cheering for one team is an experience that's hard to replicate when watching it alone with no one else other than a chat room to keep you company.
I sure hope city based esports teams tries again. Because that experience was just as fun as other Pro Leagues (NFL, NHL, MLB, NBA)
I started casting the T2/T3 scene in my country because of OWL... I wanted the league to succed so bad but every single month seemed like one step deeper into the downward spiral. Now I have legit esport fatigue and I really struggle to feel anything for an esport scene, and idk if I will one day found again this early Overwatch feel. The forced 5v5 of OW2 is so bad that I highly doubt it.
I miss the 1st year of overwatch... It was fun, it was exciting and i met a lot of friends there... Damn how the mighty have fallen.
The best moment I had was a random que where I picked Hammand and the other tanked Diva. Both of us refused to budge so we ran it. We won 12 times in a row and stayed together and for weeks. Whenever we tried to get a new player to fill a slot, EVERYONE that joined said it was a bad comp but our sharpshooter healing combo was inane but I lost my ability to play online so it ended.
damn this was super pro, the interviews, the sources, good research skills on full display! Lovely and informative, 9.6/10!
(pls for the love of god don't let an HBomberGuy happen to this one)
can't even bring myself to watch the full video. I spent so many years keeping up with the OWL since it was announced. Without it, it feels as though there is no more competitive scene at all. There are no set teams, just random tournaments. The competitive scene I've grown to love is gone. RIP OWL, and #shieldsup forever
I worked in the OWL as a SMM for FL Mayhem, NYXL, and London Spitfire. Was an amazing esport, amazing community, it just had too big of a scope.
I believe something important to the scene is the understendability of the plays done by common people kinda like the ones done in dota2 or LOL, even though R6 but you only see people running around shooting the first thing they see, making it dificult to even cast what´s happening, the same with World of Warcraft it´s boring hearing 2 hours the caster just talking to themselves without a mayor feedback, just watch the soccer transmissions, don´t take me wrong i loved this game for a long time but trying to scalate into a esport team was nonesense.
What's an SMM?
always love your work sox o7
@@allanturmaine5496 I suppose that is social media manager
ofc you were a SMM, the lgbtqxyz flag gave it away lmao
also, they don't tell you this but wokeness also killed OW. imagine if we had inncent diversity like races instead of sexualities and basing the game around sexualities
The fundamental problem that esports face that something like football doesn’t have to worry about is that there’s never going to be a football 2.
Different cities playing against each other but every player is from Korea
and most cities are from the same country
Man... I used to love that game so much, it's a real shame what they've done with it.
lol, is it just me or when I heard OWL first being a thing years ago, I already had a itch that it would fail horrendously 😂
I knew from the very start, Overwatch is just a horrible viewer experience at its core.
The owl always sucked. A prime example of why esports doesn't work
What? There's plenty of examples of esports working.
The TH-cam exclusive deal might have been the worse decision they made
I actually enjoy overwatch league for the first few years. But ever since the goats meta it keep going downhill after that. Seeing the same Meta and hero every match is boring. It's just which team is the best at playing those meta. Right now i see overwatch as a game that is fun if you play with Friend casually. Because the competitive side of things sucks especially when they release new hero that is behind the battle pass and ridiculously broken and not fun to play against. I hope The next season will change the competitive side to make it more enjoyable to play and improved the rank system. But other than that i wouldnt expect that the Pro scene of overwatch will be back anytime soon with how bad overwatch league fail.
The variety at first is what made this game great there was not one hardline meta that had to be run like goats in order to win. The Skill Gap was taken out of the game as a result of it which is why I loved the game in the first place.
The ending was just so sad. I wasn't even a huge owl fan, but i wanted to cry.
The game was literally "designed from the ground up to be an esport". It was always going to go down the path of becoming a cashgrab. It's important to remember that when being nostalgic about the first few months after its release.
I would disagree in this sense. if it was a cash grab from the start, the free and easy to earn loot boxes and skins wouldn't have been included from the get-go.
@@fidomaster447 Is this sarcasm? Lootboxes are the most widespread form of psychological manipulation to increase spending. They probably prized low because they were expecting returns from the esport, not the skin/lootbox sales. It all tracks to trying to make an esport from the ground up.
The original Overwatch was a truly amazing game that brought something fresh and innovative to the scene. It's unfortunate that lootboxes made it in the way they did, as they were very damaging in various ways.
When they first started with the OWL, it was obvious to me that THAT was really a cash grab. They looked at the huge commercial success of the League of Legends esports, and wanted a piece of that as well. Overwatch may have been made as a competitive game, but esports are a whole different beast entirely, and after Kaplan left the team it was even more obvious that they were entirely unprepared from the start
@@zeppie_ They didn't develop the game and then it became a cashgrab with the leauge. As shown in this video, they explicitly said that they developed OW with esports in mind. Furthermore, stuff like cheap lootboxes and free skins can be traced down to focusing on it as an esport: they expected to make money as an esport, so they didn't try to squeeze money the usual way.
It's the carriage-before-the-horse approach that doomed them from the start. You make a competitive game and an esport scene has to grow organically. If you force it, you get the OW league, where nobody cared about bottom teams because they didn't develop organically, so the scene rots from the bottom up. Not only that, having a constant league limits how often you can balance your game, since patches introduce a lot of instability and a competitive scene requires a stable game state (which is why League makes tournaments a couple of patches behind live servers).
not only the e sports, the whole game is a disaster, so much potential wasted. the league death is a good thing, stupid thing that ruined the balance and the whole game, 5vs5 is a huge mistake