It’s dead. I didn’t watch any of the games so far this season. I simply do not care anymore.

The league was dying way before the Overwatch 2 shenanigans. Teams were bleeding money, there were a lot of controversies about players not getting paid, some controversies about casters literally getting ghosted and not being invited to the next event with no warning… Not to mention the best players all left Overwatch completely and went on to other E-sports games.

It’s just sad at this point. Kill it. I think most teams would agree.

Even at the peak of my Overwatch playing spree, I always found Overwatch boring to… Watch. Too much going on, and if the casters were focusing on one person it was dull.

It’s like, when you watch a MOBA, there’s an ebb and flow to calm periods and to the fights and things are happening mostly in one screen and people who are fighting are right on top of each other. In Overwatch, it’s disjointed bodies shooting at each other and blocking with shields and turning to shoot other disjointed bodies with a single flick of the mouse because shields are there. And it’s non-stop. Someone is ALWAYS in a clash, and is ALWAYS doing it at whole-room scale. When people had ultimates to break a choke, it suddenly became better, but the whole in-between was just nothing. Noise. And even then, ultimates like Lucio’s or Moira’s later on could easily cause the big issue of “The blob”. Like a cartoon fight with smoke, where details don’t matter, someone sometimes can be seen choking someone else or biting their own leg, and in the end someone comes out victorious and who knows or cares why. I’ve only ever seen one game try and do worse, and it’s Splatoon. And by try, I don’t actually mean they tried much at all. But OW did.

And it wasn’t a shooter problem. Counter-Strike has such low TTK that when a clash happens, you can generally get the camera focused on those people and lose nothing of importance elsewhere. All the nitty gritty of a single round can be understood in a single, real-time watch. I couldn’t with overwatch because there were just that many people always in the heat and the important play could happen ANYWHERE.

I’ll give OWL this: they took big swings. Some of them were big hits: I think that first season was really something special. Holding every event live at the Blizzard Arena allowed an organic culture to grow around the league. They had a cast of broadcasters that knew the game, and a broadcast package that looked modern, yet was easy to follow. I’m still split on the regional team names, since the format was always going to be more or less a “travelling roadshow”, but there were people who definitely bought in because “well it’s Philadelphia”.

And yeah, some of this can be laid at the feet of the pandemic, but there were also a lot of mistakes made as well: putting roster roles in place on the pro level makes some sense, but forcing it into the game proper via Role Queue killed off a lot of the casual player base, which meant killing off your pool of viewers. The move to YouTube Live may have meant guaranteed revenue, but the viewership numbers never came close to what they were on Twitch. And, yeah, the absolute fumbling of Overwatch 2 hasn’t helped either.

Hoping the players end up getting a good amount of that payout. I wouldn’t be too shocked if the team owners took the 6 mil each and bounced.

OW2 killed what was perfect. It deserves to rot.