The Overwatch League’s first season had an explosive start. The professional eSports league for the multiplayer video game Overwatch began its first season of regular play in January 2018. The tournament was held at the Blizzard Arena in Los Angeles, and the venue was sold out for four days of the week. Online Twitch tv viewership never dropped below 285,000 viewers, much higher than the average viewership for tournament streams. Fans were not disappointed by the action, and the season’s outstanding play served to hype up stage two, which airs Feb. 21 through March 24.
Over a five-week period, each of the 12 teams compete in ten matches and are scored based on how many they win. Each team is also awarded points based on their map differential, which is calculated by subtracting the number of rounds lost from the number of rounds won (excluding tied rounds).
New York Excelsior swept first place with a 9-1 run during stage one. Second place was a tight race decided by map differential; the Houston Outlaws took a narrow second place with seven wins to three losses and a 17-point differential. The Outlaws were closely followed by third-place London Spitfire, who had the same score but only a 15-point differential. Los Angeles Valiant and Seoul Dynasty followed in fourth and fifth place, respectively, with a 7-3 score.
Florida Mayhem and Shanghai Dragons brought up the back end of the standings with 1-9 and 0-10 scores, respectively. As with any outstanding victories, there are always outstanding defeats. These losses only serve to build more hype for the upcoming weeks as the tournament continues and fans watch to see if their teams can rise up and take first place.
Each stage ends with a total of $125,000 prize split between the top two teams, with $100,000 going the winner. The total $500,000 prize pool over four stages comes as a surprise—it doesn’t even come close to the million dollar prize pools of most other large tournaments.
In this way, Blizzard Entertainment seems to have dropped the ball on their latest esports push. Many other leagues require increasingly larger prize pools to draw an audience and to get the attention of teams and gaming organizations.
Blizzard Entertainment developed Overwatch and used that to advertise the tournament to its player base. At first this move was scrutinized by the community; in the past, developers pushing an eSports scene in their own game has been shown to be just a money-grab with poor results for the community.
In fact, Blizzard Entertainment themselves tried to push for a larger “Hearthstone” and “StarCraft 2” following with these results. Since then, Blizzard has made some major improvements to all their professional scenes as they take the feedback provided by both fans and players.
Regardless, the buildup of the anticipated tournament still brought twelve of the best teams of professional Overwatch players to the main stage. Blizzard’s latest push in the eSports scene is taking off with huge success and even more to come. The four stage tournament runs from now until mid-June.
