The Overwatch League is over, at least in its current form. Following announcing the team's departure, that the company is "transitioning from the Overwatch League and evolving competitive Overwatch in a new direction." Some kind of Overwatch esport may exist in the future, but it won't be the international city-based league the OWL wanted to be.
This news won't come as a surprise to many, in fact, it's almost more surprising that it lasted as long as it did. When the OWL was announced in 2016, the plan was to create the most ambitious esport program in the world. Mimicking traditional sports, the league would be made up of teams based locally in cities around the world that would compete in home and away games for live audiences throughout a structured season. Franchise fees were significant, reportedly up to $20 million, and there were plenty of doubts about the league's, and Overwatch's, long-term viability as an esport.
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But to say that the Overwatch League's model is a failure doesn't quite capture the full picture here. There were many factors and circumstances that led to the end of the OWL, both within and outside of Activision's control, making it difficult to say with any degree of certainty exactly why the league failed.
It's impossible to know which setback did the most damage, but there's at least three major contributing factors. First is Blizzard's decision to put Overwatch on ice while it worked on Overwatch 2, which created a significant content drought for Overwatch that severely impacted general interest in the game. There's a multitude of reasons why Overwatch 2 was and continues to be a misguided project, but Overwatch's quiet years caused people to move on from the game right when the league needed them most.
The second thing, which is out of everyone's control, was Covid. Obviously you can't have in person events that require players to travel around the world and play in front of crowds of people during a pandemic, so when the league moved online starting in the third season, the dream of the OWL was put on hold. Orgs that invested millions expecting to recoup their money from events were losing money, and even though online events were successfully held, the league took another major hit.
The nail in the coffin for the OWL was the 2021 lawsuit that revealed decades of employee mistreatment and sexual misconduct allegations spanning decades at Blizzard. The league lost many advertisers as a result, while Blizzard lost respect and credibility with its community. The lawsuit was a catalyst for so many things, including the Microsoft buyout and several successful unionization efforts within the company. The OWL is a casualty of Blizzard's long history of toxic workplace culture, too.
The OWL dissolving is terrible news, and I sympathize for the players who will lose work, the fans who will lose the teams they love, and even the investors who believed in the League's vision. It's failure all but guarantees something like this will never be tried again, which is the biggest shame of all.
Though the experiment failed, I'm not convinced that the OWL's vision for esports can't still work. During the debut season, when teams played all of their matches at the Blizzard Arena in Burbank, California, I spent a lot of time at those games, and I saw the value in them. There's something special and unique about having a space for an online community to meet weekly and share in a communal experience. I have never been a sports fan, but going to that arena made it easy to understand why that's such a ubiquitous pastime all around the world.
There will always be online tournaments, but what the OWL offered was valuable too. It's too bad that it was such a train wreck, and that it's dream is likely dead. Just because the OWL didn't work doesn't mean it couldn't work, but we'll probably never find out if it what it would take to make it succeed.
