Jan 26

Jan 26 The Future Of Overwatch Esports - Game-Winning Teamkill Or Total Miss?

With the final season of the OWL Blizzard closed a chapter in Overwatch history and it felt like a final nail in the coffin for many of us that followed the competitive Overwatch scene. We were all left to believe that Overwatch esport was, as we knew it, was dead. This feeling hit even harder when you looked at each and every team taking the offered payout totalling bill for Activision Blizzard of approximately $114 million. But after three months of gut wrenching waiting and silent pain, and looking back over an incredible six seasons of play, Blizzard has finally come out with an announcement regarding its plans for the future of Overwatch esports. But how is it going to stack up with other industry-leading esports, and more importantly, how is it going to stack up with the now truly dead OWL?

The newly named OWCS (Overwatch Champion Series) is Blizzard’s answer to competitive Overwatch going forward, with a Major happening in May, and the Grand Finals taking place at Dreamhack Stockholm in November. I personally think it’s a massive oversight on Blizzard’s end to not have the Grand Finals at Blizzcon, but we’ll have to see if Dreamhack can pull in a big enough crowd. However, given how huge Counter-Strike’s Dreamhack Majors have been over the years, it’s certainly not the worst way to start a new competitive scene.

Blizzard has also partnered with FaceIt (an tournament organiser owned by the Saudi backed Savvy Gaming Group) in its North American (NA) and its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions, allowing any team to get together and have a chance of reaching the Major, or even Grand Finals if they’re good enough.

The format goes like this: week one is the qualifier, where all teams (up to a maximum of 512 teams) will go at it in a swiss stage (a bracket system designed for dealing with large numbers of teams), with the top 16 progressing onto week two and three. Here, teams will be put into groups with the top two teams of each group progressing to Week four’s eight-team double-elimination bracket (a tournament system where teams can lose up to one game and still qualify).

Meanwhile, Asia gets its own format with a Korea, Japan, and Pacific open qualifier where the top nine teams will progress to their respective regional championships. After that, the top eight teams will duke it out to see who will be representing Asia in the Grand Finals at Dreamhack.

Does still seem like there is some major kinks to worked out.

All of this sounds promising, but so did the OWL when it first got announced. Compared to other leading esports, it also feels like the OWCS (still feels weird saying that) doesn’t have nearly as much going on. While Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege also runs a Major and Grand Finals (entitled SI, or Six Invitational) in May and November, it feels like there’s just more landmark events during the R6 calendar. Meanwhile back in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive days, CS had two semi-franchised circuits going, but didn't have a world final, compared to the likes of League of Legends and Overwatch.