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Since its inception in 2017, the Overwatch League, the professional esports program for Activision Blizzard’s Overexpected hero shooter – has regularly drawn comparisons to traditional sports settings. Its stated goal, as WIRED put it in a 2017 feature, was to become the new US National Football League.
The two institutions certainly overlapped: The Overwatch League was the first major esports league to franchise local teams in major cities, and it features live spectator events with hometown crowds and paid athletes. The goal was to offer esports fans a more traditional sports model, where they could go to a local arena or venue, watch their hometown team play an ‘away’ team, and cheer at the event. The model offered local pop-up stores, team merchandise, ticket sales, media rights and licensing.
Well-known sports tycoons are co-owners of multiple esports teams. Steve Bornstein was CEO of the NFL Network before becoming Blizzard’s esports chairman. (He told WIRED in 2017, “When I left the NFL, the only thing I saw that had the potential to be this big was the esports space.”) There was no more powerful symbol of the league’s ambition than the plans for a Philadelphia Fusion stadium: a $50 million, 65,000-square-foot, 3,500-seat arena that is expected to make Philadelphia an “esports city.”
As Cecilia D’Anastasio recently revealed to Bloomberg, Activision Blizzard tempted team buyers with projected league revenue of $125 million in 2020. This money has not materialized. Although supported by the release of Overlook 2and the start of a new season of the Overwatch League, viewership has decreased. For example, Overwatch League 2022 Summer Showdown was less popular than the events of the previous two years, according to Esports Charts, with only 51,000 peak viewers, especially when you consider that franchise owners pay more than $20 million to license a team.
Questionable moves, such as switching the primary broadcast medium of the Overwatch League from Amazon-owned Twitch, the Internet’s most popular site for live-streamed game content, to YouTube in early 2020, have driven viewers away. Shortly after that move, COVID-19 halted the live, in-person events and tournaments that brought the League to life, along with the international travel players relied on to quickly get from home to games. On top of all these factors, allegations of abuse and harassment within Activision Blizzard caused gamers, advertisers and sponsors to leave the League, forcing the company to scale back some of its growth ambitions.
In 2023, the path to League profitability is unclear. The pessimism is compounded by the uncertain future of its pioneer, Bobby Kotick, and Activision Blizzard’s decision to lay off 50 esports employees by 2021. Even now, the US Federal Trade Commission is trying to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the company. To say the League has struggled in recent years is an understatement.
The latest development in this saga is the rebranding of the Philadelphia Fusion, one of the League’s more popular teams, to the Seoul Infernal. The team will move and become the second Seoul-based team, in addition to the existing Seoul Dynasty. (Most Overexpected players are South Korean and most of the competition moved there during the pandemic, while Comcast owns the Korean company T1 Entertainment and Sports.) The stadium has been abandoned and is becoming a retail facility instead.
