Well yeah you definitely need a huge playerbase to support any esport, the issue with OW's circuit is that they don't have a well put together tier 2 and tier 3 scene. And those are just the two most popular PUG services.Ĭlosed garden esports scenes just don’t work, and Blizzard has tried and failed 3 times now. In CS my friends and I can compete in ESEA qualifiers for $10/month each or FaceIt! for free. There are literally hundreds of semi pro CS teams that can compete at about a dozen different tournaments, but in overwatch there’s one league and it costs $1 million to join it. Then they had Overwatch, a game where they were selling team places in a league before the game even really came out definitely had to hurt the pro scene. Starcraft 2 was pushed as an esport, naturally everyone expected it to be, but the very waned popularity of the RTS market at the time really hurt it, on top of the very poorly laid out custom game searcher, and the fact that they tried so hard to control the pro scene before it even started really hurt them. Their entire OWL was setup in basically about six months, and that only happened because Overwatch was a breakout hit.īlizzard had success with Starcraft as the first real esport, but they didn’t create SC to be an escort, they made it balanced and an escort rose out of it by fan made tournaments. It was mostly flooded with people who were trying to make a quick buck there, like sleezy used car salesmen rather than the love of the game like LoL/DotA was in their onsets.Īlso according to my limited insider information Activision really only cared about supporting Overwatch as a competitive scene, and even everything was hella rushed. Mainstage e-sports wasn't supported so pro-talent was hard to capture (and frankly the game had a lot of questionable RNG/balance choices on a macro scale that made the game suspect from a pro-perspective).įinally, the actual esports community according to Jesse Cox (who ran his own HotS team) was hella toxic and Blizzard didn't do anything about it. And frankly the gameplay was varied, but not very deep, which is basically the opposite model of what people want out of a moba. Heroes were incredibly over-priced so that alienated casual players.
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