On July 11th, the 7 teams that will be participating in the Overwatch League were announced. Each team is based in the following cities: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Seoul.







▲ The team owners are very well-known in the sports scene.





Together with the team announcement, Blizzard also gave a brief summary regarding their plans for the league. Following in the footsteps of traditional sports like the NBA, NFL, and MLB, Overwatch League will be running a city franchise system.





What we know so far are as follows:



▷ Until the facilities are built, the League will take place in a studio in LA.



▷ Games will be played on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. (More details will be revealed later on)



▷ Income from the League will be split between all teams. Every team is fully allowed to market tickets and broadcasting.



▷ Every team is given the rights to run their own amateur tournament in their respective regions.

▷ 50% of the profit made from selling in-game items are shared to all the teams in the League.





The feedback from the fans has been mostly positive. Although the cost of entry into the league is quite high, fans were relieved when many investors joined the scene. The reason for investment is simple: the investors saw the potential for success in the league, and this will most likely increase the possibility of future investors.

▲ The fans’ expectations for future teams are growing.





Fans are also showing a positive reaction towards Blizzard’s decision in keeping the already existing leagues, such as APEX and other amateur competitions. However, Blizzard has not given further details regarding how the existing competitions will co-exist with the Overwatch League.



Fans are also awaiting changes to take place in-game, as the complaints about updates and balancing issues are rising. Many are expecting great changes to come in the future for Overwatch. This will attract further investors and bring success to the game itself.



In sports, changes were made countless times to make the games more lively. For example, in basketball, the ‘shot clock violation’ time limit was set from 30 to 24 to reduce the audience’s boredom. Even in baseball, a time limit was set in place for player swaps to speed up the entire process.





Recently, in Overwatch, many players and fans started complaining about the current “diving” meta. In order to garner more fans, it is highly likely that Blizzard will take criticism from the fans to make the game more attractive for the audience by implementing new balance patches and optimizing the observer system.







▲ How will they change the system to be more viewer-friendly?





However, complications are also expected to rise from the transition. In the past, Blizzard’s Starcraft gained an immense amount of popularity in Korea. As the game grew more popular by the day, Blizzard considered the idea of franchising. But due to the countless amount of rising complications, the idea was never implemented.





The first and most important factor for the success of the new league is money. The main source of income for the current existing leagues is advertising, broadcasting, game ticket sales, and in-game item sales. This is similar to MLB selling team uniforms and hats; except, of course, the scale is much larger for the latter.





Just looking at the many arenas and stadiums can give you a general idea. The largest esports “stadium” is located in Sangam, Korea. It has the capacity to hold 1,000 people. But compared to the MLB stadiums that hold 40,000~50,000 people and NBA stadiums that hold at least 20,000, it’s still very small. If we consider the fact that MLB makes most of their money from selling tickets, we can already see the financial limitations that esports have.







▲ In esports, it's not a common sight to see a filled stadium





However, ticket selling isn’t the only thing MLB is doing for financial profit. By selling ‘Dodger dogs’ and ‘Gilroy Garlic Fries’, and other franchise goods during on-going games, MLB gets a large portion of their income through many different products. On the other hand, esports lean towards selling in-game products before and after competitions rather than selling real-life products while the competitions are ongoing.





For Dota 2, Valve started utilizing many different marketing methods for their tournaments. On their annual ‘The International’ competition, they sold ‘Battle Passes’ to the fans, successfully raising their tournament prize pool to over 20 million dollars. Blizzard is also planning to sell ‘War Chests’ for their Starcraft franchise. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the sales of these in-game items are proving to be more than effective.







▲ Starcraft 2's 'Warchest'





But we need to ask an important question. “How will these items be advertised?”





A child being dragged along by his parents to a baseball game is a common sight, because in traditional sports, the history is long and well-respected by people of all ages and gender. On the other hand, most believe that esports is only appealing to men between 10 and 30 years old; this is a very limited demographic in comparison to the audience that traditional sports have. Due to this common opinion, many investors tend to keep away from esports, even if there are leagues proven to be successful.





However, there are exceptions such as the ‘Hot Six Energy Drink’ brand in Korea. The company gained substantial benefit from their investment, seeing their sales numbers increased by a tremendous amount. But then again, the drinks themselves are on the inexpensive side, so the price was most likely the biggest factor for their success.







▲ Compared to traditional sports, esports items are undervalued





The 2nd biggest factor for the success of the new league is the popularity of the game. How long can the game maintain its popularity?





There are many traditional sports that have been popular for decades and even centuries. Therefore, to the eyes of an investor, traditional sports will seem like the more secure choice. On the other hand, the popularity of an esports game can constantly fluctuate depending on updates and the age of software used in the game. Even the most long-lasting esports games, such as Starcraft and Warcraft 3, ran into many limitations, as there are more fans that actually watch streamers instead of actually playing the game for themselves.



Naturally, when a game loses popularity, the fanbase also becomes thinner. And although Korea’s Starcraft 1 scene had many problems such as ‘match fixing’ and the release of Starcraft 2, the biggest reason for its downfall was most likely attributed to the lack of sponsors and the decline of popularity amongst the RTS genre games.







▲ Starcraft has been around for a very long time…





There are many hills that need climbing for Overwatch League to be successful. Construction of a proper stadium as well as other facilities is also needed as soon as possible. How the fans will react to having their players go back and forth riding planes are also unknown.





If however, Overwatch manages to overcome the odds that are against them and become successful, esports itself will gain from it. And from the looks of it, Blizzard has taken their first steps in the right direction.





Many people argue that the 20 million dollars entry fee for teams to enter the 'Overwatch League' is too much. Many comments regarding it were made, such as: “No one will pay that amount,” and “It’s impractical.” But despite the opinions, 7 teams already arose and completely surprised the world. We now need to pay attention in how Blizzard and the team owners will work in cohesion to overcome the many odds counting against them and succeed.