The Biggest Disaster in Esports History

The first six months of Overwatch is still one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Sad to see how it all unraveled.

I remember downloading overwatch when it first came out and how amazing and new it felt. Slowly watching it become a money grab and watching it die out was really depressing

A Scot-Irish pub near me, now closed, had 3 screens playing sports from open to close. One behind the bar, one in the corner, and a big projector screen covering one wall. I'll never forget the time I went in there and they not only had Overwatch playing, but had it on the big screen.

I just wanted to reiterate how important it was that they had GOOD ANNOUNCERS. Its hard enough to watch some of these NHL and NFL games with crap announces, but OWL did it right 👍

it's actually crazy how OWL had some of the best casters, desk staff, players, marketing, and base game to work with and none of them deserved how terrible the OW balance team, upper management at ABK treated them and the game. this league had immense potential and wasted potential is just so sad to see, especially at this scale

One big thing for me as someone who played from the initial release is how I had paid full price for a game, only for it to be gone, and a bunch of things paywalled with what cheaply "replaces" the original game.

The toughest moment for me was with the fiasco with the player getting penalized harshly for stating a political slogan due to Chinese politics. Then firing the casters who just happened to be there. The good vibes left me there.

I loved this game so much. It really breaks my heart to see how it's all fallen apart, and how they let all the fans down.

the people crying at the end was really heartbreaking. bad organizational culture and bad management can be truly devastating.

All the old esports people knew instantly this was a sham, that the city based teams were a terrible idea. it did massive damage to sponsor opportunities for other esport games.

2016-2018 overwatch was the best time of the game. I remember playing the beta with my friends and we were hooked instantly. Loved that game when it was fun and enjoyable.

Remember how in 2018 Riot had their finals in a stadium with live performance and AR characters on stage while the Overwatch League had DJ Khaled in a studio. All while Blizzard had potentially more budget for said event.

Man, seeing the casters crying at the end as they do a final round of applause for the OWL made me tear up. The people involved in this really did deserve so much better.

the whole selling point of OW2 was "this is OW1 BUT it comes with a storyline campaign" it would carry over cosmetics and all that stuff, so people were hyped, blizzard fumbled so hard that their only real change is turning a 6v6 game to 5v5 and do some balance changes

This is the kind of crap that happens when companies get too big and officially become "corporate". It happens EVERY. DAMN. TIME.

"Over Watch was made with esports mind" I don't know about that one, everything and the close betas before launch kinda says the opposite and it feels more like that's just what Blizzard forces on things

No matter how good a game is, being handled by the wrong hands will always result in enshittification

I feel like one of the bigger topics about the scene going under that isn't ever talked about enough is the personalities in the inaugural season. half of the original roster were all streamers, that allowed the fans to form a more personal relationship the their favorite players on the teams they liked to watch play. And even if you didn't like watching them or the league games live, channels like fresh nuts brought that content to a youtube audience. Something i felt was really unique to esports was that connection you could get with individual players, and from that esoteric terms, mindsets, memes almost a whole culture could grow around one player that could spread into the whole game. Truly i feel like with enough time i could name around 70-60% of the original rosters of the inaugural season where i couldn't say shit about the seasons afterwards other than big names like flower, soon, poko, and sinatra.

One thing i couldn't understand was the team names being things like "Houston ___", "Boston ____" , "Miami ____" but a majority of them weren't even from that area? I get that's how some sports teams function but what's the point rooting for your home team if they're not even from your region?

there are tons of old backups of Overwatch from 2016-2018 on the internet, some group of people should just crack it and host private servers tbh