STOCKHOLM — Entering the final team fight of the Overwatch World Championship Series (OWCS) Grand Final, about 1,700 pairs of eyes in a Stockholm convention center scanned the two massive screens on either side of the main stage to see what ultimate abilities were available to the two teams, Crazy Raccoon and Team Falcons, arch-rivals based in Korea. Crazy Raccoon needed to win the fight to extend the match and their tank player, Junbin, had a play to make. Playing as the hero Mauga, he prepared to use the Cage Fight ultimate ability, one of the most powerful abilities in the game.
But as the fight broke out between the two teams, Team Falcons' support player, Fielder, playing Brigitte, was closely tracking Junbin's movements. When Junbin hit the Q button on his keyboard, initiating his ultimate ability, Fielder was left with just milliseconds to intervene. He rushed in and fired off a perfectly timed shield bash, stunning Junbin's character and cancelling the ultimate before the on-screen animation could complete. Overwatch matches, particularly those played at a high level, are often won and lost between pixels, and in this case Fielder's reflexes made Team Falcons world champions.
The crowd erupted, the stage lit up in flashing lights, and stage-produced sparks flew through the air as Team Falcons' players celebrated. Caster Mitch "Uber" Leslie, standing on a platform with the crowd surrounding him, made the final call: "The glorious hunt of the Falcons finally comes to an end! The apex predators stand at the apex now as your 2024 champions!"
Team Falcons lifted the trophy. More sparks, more confetti, more cheers from the crowd.
This was the first pro Overwatch event I had attended in person, despite following the esport for seven years. It wasn't an experience I ever expected to have. Just 13 months earlier, the Overwatch League (OWL) held its last Grand Final in Toronto, and shortly thereafter announced that the league's teams had voted to accept a buyout from the league and end operations. Those buyouts marked the end of a long and humiliating fall for professional Overwatch, which came into the world with designs on becoming the biggest game in esports.
In the wake of OWL's collapse, there remained a question: Was the league's failure something that could have been prevented with more sensible management, or was Overwatch itself, as a game, incapable of catching on in the crowded and fickle world of esports? I went to Stockholm because I was interested in talking to people who might be able to answer that question. Like everyone else in that convention hall, I was there to see a thrilling game of Overwatch, sure, but we were also there to see if pro Overwatch could be resurrected.
Overwatch is a competitive first-person hero shooter made by mega-developer Activision Blizzard, and it was lauded as the Game of the Year when it was released in 2016. The game, now in its second iteration, features five players on each side, each controlling one of a large cast of diverse characters, called heroes. Each hero has special abilities, movement styles, weapons, and ultimates. Overwatch is set in an idealized, yet sometimes dystopian vision of Earth in 2077 (players sometimes joke that Sigma, the game's oldest and probably most insane hero, is Gen Z).
Blizzard announced the formation of the Overwatch League in 2016, set to launch the following year. Rather than following the traditional esports path, Blizzard assigned teams to represent different cities across the world, like the San Francisco Shock or the Seoul Dynasty. According to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier's new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, then-Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick saw the new league as a chance to build "the NFL of video games." And that's essentially what they built, at least for a couple of years.
At one point, Blizzard executives were looking at partnering with the NBA to jointly launch OWL, but Kotick scrapped that idea. Blizzard originally tried to start small, initially proposing to sell franchise slots in the unproven league for a reasonable $250,000 each. After all, esports was (and some would argue still is) unproven as a viable business model, so a low buy-in rate would lower the potential risk for initial investors.
But Kotick, no stranger to rolling in billionaire social circles, announced to the Blizzard team that he wanted to instead offer franchise slots for an eye-popping $20 million. According to Schreier, Kotick wanted to recruit billionaires who already owned traditional sports franchises, despite the fact that most of the world had no idea what this Overwatch game was to begin with. "Kotick's peers would only be interested if they believed they could turn $20 million into, say, $100 million," wrote Schreier. "The downside was that each Overwatch team began $20 million in the hole."
The ambitious league launched with a Twitch streaming deal worth $90 million, and 415,000 viewers tuned into the first game's stream. Blizzard later announced that over 10 million unique viewers tuned into the first weekend and Blizzard Arena in Burbank, Calif. was sold out for the initial weekend.
"In 2018, we were really optimistic," Leslie told me in the food common at the convention center after Saturday afternoon’s games had concluded. "We were starting something new. We didn't know what the future would hold. We were pretty ambitious as well … I shot an ad for Toyota. That was a surreal experience for a kid that just wanted to talk about video games."
But even early on, cracks began to show. Attendance at Blizzard Arena started to fall during OWL's first season, a worrying sign for teams that had invested tens of millions of dollars in an unproven product.
There was still reason for optimism. The 2019 season began with a broadcast TV rights deal with Disney/ESPN/ABC, and this was about the time that I started following the league. I can still remember the moment that hooked me: In a match against the undefeated Vancouver Titans, an LA Valiant support player named KariV hit a ridiculous sleep dart on a mid-air Pharah. As an Overwatch player, I understood the absurd combination of reflexes, game sense, and eye-hand coordination required to make a play like that; how could I not fall in love with what I was seeing?
It was around this time that Hadi Bleinagel, a 24-year-old from Germany who goes by "Hadi" in game, was making a name for himself on the London Spitfire Academy team. "Nobody ever goes into a game and tries to be pro, I feel like that's already the wrong mindset," he told me in an interview over Zoom about a week before Stockholm. "You have to have a passion for the game and then just see what happens and then it just rolls [from there]."
Hadi and his academy teammates signed for the senior team with Spitfire in 2020; his salary was around $80,000. Some star players made substantially more than him, especially in the earlier years of the league.
2020 was the year the league was supposed to move away from hosting its regular-season games at Blizzard Arena, instead hosting homestands in the cities that had teams, but the pandemic quickly killed that idea, moving gameplay completely online. "It turned out to be an iffy decision because we could not have a team house because it was during COVID," said Hadi. "We were all playing on ping and all from home, and ping is really, really, really hard to play with, and it was a really, really difficult season."
Ping is the speed, measured in milliseconds, at which game data is transmitted from your computer to the game server, and it's highly geographically important. Having a lower ping means you send and receive information on the live game quicker than those with higher ping. Local Area Network (LAN) events typically have no ping at all, giving a level playing field to all players.
That same year, YouTube bought out the exclusive streaming rights to the league, moving it away from the original streaming home of gaming, Twitch. The following year, Activision Blizzard was hit with a horrific sexual harassment lawsuit that chased away most of the league's sponsors.
The writing was on the wall. "For us there, it felt like the whole scope of everything slowly in that COVID era, but even after it, felt like the ambition was shrinking," said Leslie. "All of a sudden we kind of got to the point where it was like, OK, well, 2023 rolls around and I don't have any official confirmation on what's going to happen, but the word on the grapevine is that this is the last year of the Overwatch League."
Watching that Grand Final in 2023, it felt like the end of an era. The Florida Mayhem were crowned champions, and the casters gathered together with the analyst desk for the season's final shot. Several were crying.
"That last day was hugely emotional because I don't think there's any way around it, we kind of knew that something was looming, although the league hadn't officially announced that it was closing," desk analyst Jonathan "Reinforce" Snowden told me.
Leslie walked me through his call at the end of the Florida Mayhem's win in the 2023 OWL Grand Final. "I used the phrase 'Kings for all time,'" he said. "I knew going into that game that this was it."
No one, at least from the outside looking in, knew what was to come next.
How do you rebuild an esport from scratch? That task was left to Bailey McCann and Sean Miller. McCann was made Project Lead for OWCS, the pro league that aims to succeed where OWL failed, and Calling All Heroes—Overwatch's professional development league for underrepresented genders. Miller is the head of Overwatch Esports.
"To me, one of the most beautiful things about esports broadly is that it doesn't matter your physical height, how strong you are, none of that matters," Miller told me in Stockholm. "It matters just how good you are at Tracer or Genji, or how good of a teammate you are, how good of a leader you are in the game. And that all, I think, bundles up in this word we call skill."
It was important to Miller to set up a new professional system that still rewarded skill in the game, so instead of the closed-off, overly expensive franchise model that launched OWL, the new OWCS features an open qualifier system. This means that any team, from anywhere in the world, can compete in OWCS and even make it all the way to the Grand Final, if they are good enough.
Miller cited the presence specifically of the team NTMR (pronounced "nightmare") in Stockholm. NTMR are a new organization that formed in April 2024 to compete in the Face It League Masters Division. Face It is a lower level competition that serves as a makeshift minor league to OWCS. Through several roster reconfigurations, NTMR managed to qualify for Stockholm by finishing third in the OWCS North American division.
Going forward, these types of promotions should become more common, as Season 2 of OWCS will feature a full promotion and relegation system, where teams that finish at the top of the local Face It Masters Division in North America and Europe (and WDG in Korea) will compete with the bottom teams in OWCS for a spot in the next OWCS regional qualifying stage.
"I used to participate in open division a couple years ago with Overwatch esports, I coached in Contenders [the old Overwatch minor league system] and I think it's been really great where we help reduce the barriers for folks to get to the high level," McCann told me in Stockholm. "Whoever you are, you're able to play, make it to the top, you have a good time. I really feel like the open ecosystem just does that best."
McCann envisions a system where teams can more easily stick together as they move up or down within the system's levels, which should help fans more easily keep track of roster changes without the closed system of the Overwatch League.
"We always looked at 2024 as kind of a foundation. We had strong belief in that hypothesis I just talked about of openness, accessibility," said Miller. "This year, I didn't know exactly how it would go. We haven't done this in seven years, and so I think it's gone better than I would've ever thought."
Snowden sees a more sustainable future for the esport with the open system. "You're seeing that there's an importance put on grassroots esports, grassroots Overwatch, in that anyone who is competitive, it doesn't matter if you're Grandmaster, Top 500, or if you're Diamond [three of the four highest competitive ranks in the game] and you're looking to improve, you can participate in the OWCS, you can try to qualify for OWCS," he said. "There's an importance put on the individual player, the people playing the game, rather than generating revenue returns for investors or people coming in with brands."
But creating a new system doesn't always mean it'll work equally well for everyone. Player salaries are lower now without the stability provided by the Overwatch League system. Hadi told me that his own salary dropped, from the $80,000 he made during OWL to about $20,000 under the OWCS system, not including potential cash prizes he could win through good tournament results.
Rupal Zaman, a 22-year-old pro player who played in Stockholm with the Toronto Defiant, one of the few organizations that decided to retain its name from the OWL days, told Defector that it would be financially difficult to play professionally without the creation of the esports World Cup this past year.
"Without the esports World Cup, the amount of prize money in the scene is just so much lower," he told me in a Zoom interview a few weeks before Stockholm. "Getting first place at DreamHack Dallas [for the midseason LAN tournament], that's literally less than getting second place at esports World Cup."
The esports World Cup is not affiliated with OWCS, having been created with funding from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. The World Cup was played this past summer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and featured a $60 million prize pool in 23 different events in 22 different games, including Overwatch. It has drawn widespread criticism from both within the esports scene and from elsewhere as yet another example of the oppressive Saudi regime engaging in sportswashing.
Some folks in the Overwatch esports scene chose to skip out on the Saudi festivities, but for young players like Rupal, who just want to make a living playing the game they love, the tournament's prize money ($160,000) for his team's second-place finish went a long way. For winning the final year of Overwatch League, Rupal's Florida Mayhem team took in a million-dollar prize.
Players weren't the only ones to take a financial hit from the transition to OWCS. "Luckily I was able to keep getting work with the OWCS, but I had to add a lot of other work to my portfolio in order to continue to give my family the quality of life that I wanted to provide to them," said Leslie. "If I could have it my way, I would've just been an Overwatch Andy and done it. But that wasn't an option. I wasn't sure going into other games whether I would even be good at it, whether what I could do in Overwatch was even transferable to a different kind of game."
Leslie did find some work, casting some mobile games that weren't direct competitors of Overwatch, and even getting a chance to work on a few Valorant broadcasts here and there.
"It was hard. I had to do a lot of study, a lot of prep, and I had to play the game a lot. And I had to do that also while still staying good at Overwatch, delivering the quality that I felt that I had to, and also being involved in raising my kids," he said.
Rupal said that he was pleasantly surprised at the level of play in the new OWCS system, but that he'd like Blizzard to improve upon the watchability of the league. "OWCS is on Twitch actually, and YouTube, but the problem isn't the platform that it's on, it's rather the advertisement of OWCS is pretty low compared to how other video games advertise their esports, like League of Legends or Valorant," he said. "In games like that, it's kind of hard to not eventually stumble upon the esports scene, but there's always people in Overwatch that are like, they start watching OWCS and they're like, 'Oh, I didn't even know that Overwatch esports still existed. I thought Overwatch League died. I didn't even know this existed.'"
Miller and McCann have a plan for that. Next season, OWCS will partner with nine teams and allow those teams to sell skins within the Overwatch game client, which serves to both raise awareness of the OWCS within the larger player base, and also provides a few select teams with another key revenue source.
Miller said that the team partner program is what excites him the most about the next season of OWCS. "It doesn't necessarily affect the core competitive experience, but it's the potential that it brings to really drive fandom in this esport in a way that can have a little bit more direct relationship in supporting teams and players. I'm really excited about the potential that'll bring."
In Stockholm, Hadi's team had a tough outing, losing both games they played in the double elimination tournament. Afterwards, he told me over text that it just happens that way sometimes, but he expressed excitement for the team partner program. "Just imagine if there was a player title or a skin for Proper [a Korean player on the champion squad Team Falcons who is widely considered the best player in the world] on Genji, or even me on Reinhardt. I think people would be happy with that," he said during his interview a few weeks before the Stockholm tournament.
For McCann, who is seemingly universally loved within the Overwatch esports scene, and who could be seen power-walking from task to task while stopping to chat with friends and fans throughout the weekend in Stockholm, the LAN events are what keep her going, and why she puts so much time and effort into getting it right with OWCS.
"Gaming continues to be a bigger part of so many people's lives," she said. "You hear the crowd cheering [and] it's infectious … If you don't get it, just show up and you'll feel the magic and then you’ll get it."
Walking out of the venue in Stockholm, I turned the two versions of professional Overwatch over in my head. Even in the wake of its collapse, it's hard not to feel nostalgic for OWL, which felt big and important. OWL promised—and for a time delivered—spectacle for fans and livable wages for players. Sustainability is a virtuous goal for OWCS to pursue, and the competitive purity it promises is exciting. But how long will pro players stay with it if they can only scrape together a few thousand dollars per year from playing?
My gut tells me that this first year of OWCS has laid an important cornerstone for a lasting esports scene for the game, but mistakes can still be made. A few weeks after the Grand Finals, Overwatch lost one of its most beloved franchises, the NRG Shock (a carryover franchise from the OWL days), who decided to exit the system after not being considered for one of the new partner slots.
Overactive Media, a publicly traded esports company that owned the Toronto Defiant throughout the late OWL days and into this season of OWCS, announced last month that they would be stepping away from Overwatch in 2025 and discontinuing the Defiant brand. Last week, Overactive CEO Adam Adamou was interviewed in a YouTube video with longtime caster and analyst Kev "AVRL" Walker. Adamou accused Activision Blizzard of being too stingy in helping partner teams make money. "[The Overwatch development team is] being tentative, they're taking small steps, and they're not investing heavily," he told Walker. "So the burden then falls on teams to take the risks they're not willing to take … Our business is not to subsidize trillion-dollar companies."
Additionally, a new game, Marvel Rivals, an Overwatch-like hero shooter featuring beloved Marvel characters, has already shown ambitions to launch its own esports scene—and called in some experienced Overwatch casters for their broadcasts. Rivals' existential threat to the game itself is a story for another day, but it's impossible to analyze Overwatch these days without mentioning its upstart competitor.
As with previous shooter game launches (like 2020's Valorant, which took several top Overwatch players), some pro players will likely jump ship, especially if they can see a viable financial future in the new game. I think there will be an Overwatch esports scene as long as the game continues to be serviced by Blizzard, but to truly make it over the next few years, the system must find a way to pay its players enough to keep them committed to the game. Whether or not that happens largely depends on how much enthusiasm—among fans, players, advertisers, and media partners—the OWCS can create. I felt that enthusiasm firsthand in Stockholm, to such a degree that I can't wait to attend another pro match in person. The OWCS has a long way to go to replace OWL, but this time it at least feels like something real and lasting is being built.
