I’ll give anything a chance if it’s produced by OnGameNet. The legendary Korean broadcaster basically invented modern esports, and tournaments like the OGN Starleague (StarCraft) and OGN Champions (LoL) gave us the defining moments of their respective games.

That said, the grand finals of APEX Season 2 — OGN’s flagship Overwatch tournament — wasn’t exactly an auto-watch for me. In the eleven months since its release, there has been a growing sentiment that Overwatch is a game that everyone likes to play, but no one really likes to watch. I’ve lost track of the number of times I heard stuff along the lines of “the spectator mode is terrible and really hurts its chances as an esport.”

But I tuned in anyway, since I’m a sucker for overly dramatic videos, middle-aged men hollering at the top of their lungs, and all the other things OGN is great at.

Upon clicking the stream link, I was immediately greeted by the shriek of a pterodactyl. I wondered if I had mistakenly turned on a Journey to Un’Goro stream, but then I noticed that the single, piercing note was accompanied by a high-pitched chorus. I put the images together with the sounds, and realized what I was watching.

Fangirls. Thousands of them.

The finals between Lunatic-Hai and RunAway lasted for about three hours, going the full distance to game seven. The cheering never diminished in its ferocity.

I tried to remember other finals crowds that had a similar nature, thinking back on marquee match-ups such as Flash vs. Jaedong in Brood War or SK Telecom T1 vs. ROX Tigers in League of Legends. Yet, I still couldn’t think of a previous match that was quite as reminiscent of a K-pop concert as this clash between two Overwatch teams I had never seen before.

Now, there are plenty of metrics of success in esports, most of them related in some way to viewership numbers. Yet, I feel like the number of fangirls in attendance might be a more useful indicator than any manipulation of streaming stats.

You see, any competent organization worth its salt can massage some bullshit like “we have more viewers than the NCAA tournament” out of a tangled heap of streaming data. But if you can say “we have as many screaming high school girls as a Big Bang concert,” then you’re actually saying something other people can’t. There’s a chance you’ve got your hands on something really unique and special.

Regardless, I still went ahead and tallied the ‘conventional’ stats you see plastered on Twitter/Reddit after any major finals. Across stream platforms that display viewer numbers (Youtube, Twitch, Afreeca), APEX finals pulled a solid 150k+ viewers at its peak, with a large majority of those viewers watching the Korean streams. Stream scientists can correct me if I’m wrong, but that seems pretty goddamn solid for a country of 50 million.

The VOD numbers were impressive as well. On OGN’s Youtube channel, the four-part finals has currently recorded around 180,000~330,000 views on each of its installments. As far as I can tell, that’s more views than anything else OGN has put out this year, save the regular season SKT-KT telecom derby from LCK.

So, whether you’re going by shoddy public viewership numbers, or my shoddy fangirl metric, it appears that Overwatch esports has got some serious shit going on in Korea.

Given all the cynicism around Overwatch esports in the West, it came as a bit of a surprise. But after giving it some thought, I felt that perhaps there was nothing to be surprised about.

With Blizzard’s ambitious Overwatch League looming, no organization besides OnGameNet has actually committed to holding a serious Overwatch tournament on par with major tournaments for other games.

Is it really surprising, then, that when a reputable organization actually holds a prestigious and meaningful tournament for an immensely popular game, it becomes a success? Does it really matter that a game is visually complex when when a ton of people are playing? I mean, we already saw this kinda happen five years ago: OGN’s LoL Champions Korea (the predecessor of LCK) was also packing live venues with thousands of people by its second season.

Welcome to the future, again.

Korean esports has always had a mixed identity, wandering back and forth between shounen anime and K-pop. I’ve never seen an esport skew so heavily on the side of making their players idol-stars, and perhaps APEX should lean even further in that direction. From the LCK to the GSL, Korean esports has continued to live in the shadow of Brood War, and maybe this is a chance to create a different kind of culture. Who knows? Maybe Overwatch will be the game where international players say they want to come to Korea to experience the amazing crowds, and not the other way around.