Professional Competition Arrives for Overwatch

     For those of you not familiar with this title, Overwatch is a first person shooter (FPS) created by Blizzard Entertainment. It came out in May 2016 and has been an overwhelming success even before its release, during the beta testing. You, as the player, choose from one of twenty-three characters to play in every round, each with his or her own unique abilities. You must coordinate with your teammates to build a balanced team with all the facts it needs: a healer, someone who takes all the damage, and maybe even a sniper or two. In this way it draws on elements from multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs).

     About a month after the game’s release, the developers at Blizzard Entertainment implemented a competitive play mode that pairs you up with others based on your skill, ping, and group size. This mode includes a scoring system that shows you how you’re doing in relation to other characters, though you tend to be paired up with people close to your rating. After six months and two seasons of this competitive play, Blizzard Entertainment has announced that they are starting the “Overwatch League,” which is, essentially, professional competition in Overwatch. Players from all over the world are going to come together, competing to see which team will be crowned number one.

     There are some promising details that Blizzard Entertainment has teased to the public in their advertisement and website featuring Overwatch League. In conventional eSports leagues, it is always a risk whenever a professional gamer signs a contract for a team. They have to maintain (and even improve) their exemplary performance during the entire season; if a player shows any signs of deteriorating, no matter the reason, the team usually kicks them out with little to no compensation. However, the Overwatch League is supposedly going to treat its players: when a player signs a contract for a team, that contract lasts for the entire season, no matter what happens. In this way, Overwatch League has dissolved the problem of teams scrambling for a new player mid-season, and it gives players a chance to get back on their feet after a lull during the season.

     Teams will also be regionally based, and Blizzard Entertainment is hoping that this will garner loyalty from fans of the same city or county, much like how someone born in Los Angeles would be a fan of the LA Kings. However, this does pose some problems. Will fans be willing to move with their favorite team, and will there be people filling the stands at each game every week? Another issue is that there are already eSports leagues established in major cities around the country, and the vast majority of them are clustered here, in Los Angeles. This raises the question of which eSports league here is willing to relocate to another city with fewer organizations. So far, however, Blizzard has not made it clear how they want to address these problems.