In a 2017 interview with The Esports Observer, Blizzard Entertainment esports franchise lead for Heroes of the Storm (HOTS) Sam Braithwaite stated a goal for the game’s professional league, the Heroes of the Storm Global Championship (HGC), saying “I don’t want a single unsponsored team in 2018.”

Last weekend, the 2018 HGC season wrapped up with its world championship at BlizzCon, creating the perfect opportunity to examine if Blizzard was able to deliver on this goal.

Unfortunately, by looking at just the North American and European leagues, we see that each region has two teams without any organization affiliation. In fact, multiple organizations left the HGC during the 2018 season. While it is unfair to compare the HGC to a franchised league like the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), the lack of interest from organizations is concerning for a league run by the same developer that pioneered the franchise system in esports with the Overwatch League (OWL). In fact, only two HGC-affiliated organizations have representation in either the LCS or OWL.

Since 2015, Heroes of the Storm has seen more top-level esports organizations leave the game than join it. Cloud9 , Natus Vincere , Virtus.pro , and Evil Geniuses all left the game before the launch of the HGC, but the league system has not enticed them to return. If the HGC structure is not able to attract organizations to HOTS, then perhaps it is time to explore an alternative competitive structure for the game.

Do It Like Dota

While many developers are moving their esports titles toward weekly league systems, Dota 2 has held firm to its professional tournament circuit, which culminates in one of the biggest esports events of the year, The International. In the Dota Pro Circuit, developer Valve selects third-party organizers to run tournaments throughout the world. Teams compete in these tournaments in order to earn points, which then qualify them for The International.

If this system were implemented in Heroes of the Storm, it would eliminate two of the biggest issues for organizations and sponsors with the HGC system: online play and relegation.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Jersey sponsors are virtually invisible during the HGC regular season.[/perfectpullquote]

With the exception of four events, the entirety of the HGC season is played online, rather than live on a stage. This creates a variety of problems for both players and the brands they represent. Most importantly for organizations, their players are effectively removed from the weekly broadcast. This means that jersey sponsors are virtually invisible during the HGC regular season. Further, players are only visible on screen for any significant length of time during interviews featuring one member of the winning team after each game.

With the players largely invisible during most HGC broadcasts, it is difficult for fans to build a connection to the personalities on each team, thereby hurting the organization’s ability to build content around their HOTS squad. Sponsored content is one of the primary ways brands can activate with esports organizations, so a lack of content further reduces the value of HOTS teams for both organizations and sponsors.

Related Article: How Heroes of the Storm Broke the Mold in a Genre of Esports Juggernauts

Additionally, the HGC still utilizes a relegation system wherein the bottom two teams in each league must compete against amateur squads to retain their spot in the following season. Before the LCS moved to its franchise system, Team SoloMid owner Andy “Reginald” Dinh spoke out on Twitter about his organization’s challenges in securing sponsors and investing more into League of Legends, attributing these struggles in part to the existence of relegation. For both organizations and brands, this system makes investing in any game a much greater risk, as they could be completely eliminated from the league after a single season of poor performance.

Image Credit: Blizzard

In a tournament circuit system like that of Dota 2, both of these problems are removed. Each tournament in the circuit would be held live (perhaps after an initial round of online qualifiers), giving players and their jersey sponsors more screen time. While a bad weekend of play may cause a team to miss a single tournament, that group of players could take time to regroup before the next competition, or compete in non-circuit events hosted by other organizers.

Give the People What They Want

Not only would a global tournament circuit address challenges in attracting organizations, it would likely increase viewership for Heroes of the Storm esports overall. By far, the single event in the HOTS calendar that generated the most hours watched in 2018 was the Mid-Season Brawl—an international tournament which held its final weekend during DreamHack Summer in Stockholm, Sweden. This event outperformed even the $1M prize pool world championship at BlizzCon. Fans of Heroes of the Storm want to see the best teams in the world competing across multiple days, in person. The BlizzCon final peaked on Nov. 3 at 310.30K hours watched to the Mid-Season Brawl’s 538.37K on June 17.

The stakes of the Mid-Season Brawl are nothing compared to those of the BlizzCon tournament. And yet, with only a quarter of the world championship’s prize pool on the line, the event has become the most popular tournament of the HGC calendar.

This shows that tournaments operated by third parties can support greater viewership than the current online league system. Even if the tournament circuit resulted in fewer total hours of HOTS esports broadcasts overal, the value of those hours to both the viewer and the organizations in the scene would be substantially greater.

Why Not Just Franchise?

Of course, there is an alternate strategy that Blizzard could employ to “save” the HGC. If the developer simply copied the Overwatch League franchise structure, it would also effectively solve the issues of online play and relegation, while also allowing Blizzard to retain full organizational control over the game’s professional scene. However, there are a few problems with that strategy.

First, Blizzard would need to find long-term partners willing to invest in Heroes of the Storm. While a reasonably popular title in terms of player base, HOTS is nowhere near the cultural phenomenon Overwatch was at the Overwatch League’s inception. There is no guarantee that 8-10 well-established organizations or investors would be willing to pay a hefty franchise fee to buy in on a title whose regular season viewership falls below even that of Rocket League.

Further, the Overwatch League is a global league that began with just 12 teams. If Heroes of the Storm were to move to a similarly geolocated, global franchise league, it would mean removing dozens of existing teams, players, and support staff from the ecosystem. This move would risk alienating fans loyal to those players and teams, all for a highly expensive league structure with no guarantee of success.

Alternatively, HOTS could adopt the LCS model of regional franchised leagues, but this would require even more organizations willing to invest for the long haul, and even more infrastructure. In a tournament circuit system, much of the operating and marketing cost is passed along to third party organizers while Blizzard would simply supply the events with prize pools and prestige.

The excitement of the Overwatch League’s first season and the enduring popularity of the LCS may lead organizers and investors to believe that league systems are the only way to build sustainable esports, but Valve has proved with Dota 2 that this is simply not the case. By learning from these games, Blizzard could create more value for organizations, provide a greater viewer experience, and bring more attention to its lesser-known esports title.