Competitive Overwatch is already taking shape © Blizzard Entertainment

It feels like just yesterday that everyone and their mother was hanging on every last piece of Overwatch content and theorizing what Fall 10th really meant. But now it’s been around half a year since Overwatch has released into beta, and lots has happened since then. Thousands of games have been played, teams have been formed, and tournaments are popping up everywhere.

Professional organizations have taken notice, too. Veteran FPS players are banding together as teams, and some have been picked up. The past month has seen two major eSports teams jump on the bandwagon: Cloud9 was the first major organization to step into the space and pick up a team, and Team Liquid recently announced their own team as well. And while there have been several online tournaments, this past weekend was host to the biggest yet: The One Nation of Gamers Overwatch Invitational.

Overwatch has seen some promising growth, but any new title carries risk. Where does Overwatch stand coming into its last month before release?

Getting the Team Together

As with most competitive video games that haven’t broken critical mass and become eSports, most of the top Overwatch teams aren’t part of professional organizations. Cloud9’s newest team is no different: originally known as ‘google me,’ they were simply a group of friends. “All of us have played together in previous games,” said Cloud9’s Overwatch captain KyKy. “Reaver, deBett, and I have been playing games for many years. I met Adam a little over a year ago in World of Warcraft, where we were both from the current #3 US guild vodka. Reaver met Surefour through Titanfall, and Grego through Shootmania.”

This kind of story is par for the course in Overwatch - teams are primarily cobbled together from groups of friends or well-known shooting game players. But “google me” broke through: after a long string of notable placings in the GosuGamers weekly Overwatch circuit, they caught the eye of Cloud9. For team manager Danan Flander, investing in Overwatch early made a lot of sense, both as a fan and a businessman. “Jack and I are tried and true Blizzard fans and many of our players are fond of Blizzard's series of games, so it only made sense for our interest to be piqued when OW was announced. On top of that, we're always excited to expand the Cloud9 brand.”

On the business end, early investment in a scene can be a great advantage as well. “You get an early beat on the pulse of the community. Getting in early gives us ample time to network with the players and personalities of the scene; this allows us to get a read on the type of community we'll be working with for years to come,” said Flander. “The second reward is a bit less tangible. Investing in a scene early is our way of signaling to the developers that we're committed to the long term sustainability of that game as an eSport.”

However, that great advantage only matters if the scene succeeds - and when the players involved are a good fit. “The first team you pick up early in a eSports development often sets the community's opinion of your brand. This can be very dangerous for the long term sustainability of your brand in that particular scene if your first official roster behaves unprofessionally or consistently performs poorly,” says Flander. And like it or not, that’s a position that Team Liquid may be finding itself in: they are the second major team to announce an Overwatch division, and included in their initial lineup is Kevin “AZK” Lariviere. AZK was banned from Valve competitions for life after taking part in match-fixing in CS:GO. One can hope that he has turned over a new leaf, but to Flander’s point: a professional organization only gets one shot at a good first impression.

Flavor of the Meta

Teams going pro in a new game is great, but what about the game itself? Has it continued to withstand the test of high-level play? The answer is a resounding… kind of. Overwatch tournament metas have cycled drastically, from tank metas, to healer metas, to barrier metas, and most recently, to Tracer metas.

Through an optimist’s eyes, that means there are a lot of different strong strategies. But this could also foreshadow a larger issue - that niche strategies and gimmicks are more effective than balanced team play. This weekend in the finals of the One Nation Of Gamers Invitational, REUNITED pulled out a full team’s worth of Tracers as a strategy - not to combat the other team, but to blink around the objective and stall the movement of it enough for long enough to come out victorious.

Genji has been a strong overall pick in early OW © Blizzard Entertainment

Which brings up another point: up until now, games that require pushing an objective such as Overwatch and Team Fortress 2, have relied on a system known as Stopwatch. This mandates that if both teams win or lose on a map, the team that gets the farthest, or completes the stage the fastest, wins. This exacerbates the issues mentioned above; instead of trying to win, or come up with strategies to defeat the opponent outright, defensive team compositions that can stall for as long as possible become favorable. In Team Fortress 2 it was perhaps the best solution available at the time, but Stopwatch is inevitably a flawed measurement of skill.

Luckily, there is a solution to several of these problems. The introduction of an Overwatch-backed mode called Competitive Play ditches Stopwatch for a solution that not only diffuses the time-based issues Stopwatch presents, but includes both modes the title has to offer. Now, instead of games being decided by the clock, a match where teams end up tied on a map result in a best-of-one overtime match on a Point Capture map . This way there is a definitive winner and loser, and offensive strategies that are slower-paced become just as viable as their faster-paced counterparts - as long as they result in victory.

The First Watch Starts Soon

The third measure of a community’s health is its tournaments, and in that regard Overwatch is showing some true promise. This weekend’s One Nation Of Gamers Invitational boasted a $3,000 prize pool. That number is admittedly meager compared to a League of Legends or CS:GO tournament, but as the biggest prize in Overwatch thus far, it attracted the best teams from NA and EU. And while the future of the new shooter in the professional space is up in the air, it would seem that for now Cloud9’s investment has paid off - the team took the ONOG Invitational in grand fashion.

Now all that’s left is to see who follows in their footsteps.