By Gio Gaxiola — Reporter
Every professional sports league goes through a rough patch where it may never recover from.
The same rule seems to now apply to esports leagues. Although esports is one of the only sporting activities on TV, that doesn’t mean that all the leagues are prospering.
One league that is going through that rough patch is the Overwatch League.
Since its debut in 2018, the OWL has been home to some of the best pro Overwatch players, who battle it out on franchise teams. Think of the NFL but instead of football, they are playing Overwatch.
This year the league tried to expand and have a home series for each team. This would have been a huge popularity boost for the league.
However, no one saw the COVID-19 pandemic happening, and it wiped out all of the home series this year. This was a huge blow to the league.
One change this year that hurt the league was moving their streams from Twitch over to YouTube.
This angered a lot of fans.
OWL games used to get around 80,000 views per match. Now a match can not even crack 35,000 viewers. This is a bad sign for a league that is in danger of folding.
On top of this decline in viewers, players are now leaving too. It seems as days go by, more and more players are retiring from professional Overwatch.
Some retired OWL players are leaving to go try to make a pro scene in the new game Valorant.
A prime example is the San Francisco Shock’s main DPS and last year’s league MVP Jay “Sinatrra” Won, who is leaving the league to go play for a Valorant team.
In an open letter to the public, Won wrote: “ I straight up lost passion for the game. I don’t know what the real killer was for me but maybe it was the 2-2-2 role lock, or maybe it was the hero bans. I am not sure. I just know it was hard for me to log on to play and I didn’t have fun anymore.”
This was the worst case for a league that was already suffering some setbacks. The reigning MVP is saying this game has gotten stale and boring.
Junior Edward Jay “BlueJay” Ham, captain of the San Jose State Overwatch team shared his thoughts on the state of Overwatch.
“The only way I see OWL surviving as an e-sport is if Overwatch 2 does really well or Blizzard opens up its control over the Overwatch pro scene,” Ham said. “OWL was already on thin ice before Valorant, I think this is probably the last straw.”
What do we make of a league that keeps on suffering setbacks and losing viewership?
A lot of leagues in the past have collapsed on themselves and had to close down. One example is the Alliance of American Football.
The AAF had only one season that lasted two months before the league had to suspend operations because it was not making money.
The recently defunct XFL is another league that had suffered before it disbanded but the COVID-19 pandemic can be blamed for that one.
The only thing Overwatch fans can do is support the league as much as they can. The streams must get a bump up in viewership. People will also need to buy more merchandise.
There are some people who think Overwatch will still stay relevant.
“Overwatch will not be dying out anytime soon. In fact, the game’s player count has been growing according to the game’s director, Jeff Kaplan.” said SJSU’s freshman healer, Jermey “ElevenKing” Esch.
As for the league itself, Blizzard must find a way to stop their players from leaving their league. If they do not fix this soon, the OWL will be the next AAF or XFL.
Follow Gio on Twitter @GaxiolaGio