@@phitc4242 gonna assume ur joking, but if not, he's probably like the 2nd best hitscan in NA amd arguably first cause sometimes he is better than seeker other times not
@@marce1_1 I legit did not know he was in OWCS, but then again, I don't follow it (gotta play myself u know). just seen some videos of his. he's a funny dude for sure
I also think Pick em was a fun app to compare your preds with other poepel online easily and it was just a fun easy way kind of like when you made preds for an upcoming sports tourtamnet like NBA Playoff or World Cup etc
something i'd also like to mention that was brought up when owcs was announced, under-age talent is dead with the death of contenders and od. a large portion of the players who compete today were competing at a very young age in contenders. if i look at crazy raccoons, chorong started competing at 15, heesang at 14/15, junbin at 14, lip at 16, max at 15, and shu at 17. it feels like this new system makes it so hard for talent to develop. and that's in a scene where the talent is literally all retiring because of the new system. how will we replace our old top level talent when its so hard to even develop new ones? like, in na, toronto and m80 basically have all the t1 talent left, and that's like 8 players 😭. and even then they're still losing players to retirement. lyar might be retiring, and let's be honest coluge really dgaf he just there because they're at winthrop and needed a tank.
Given reports that Overwatch isn't making enough money to even qualify for bonuses for its dev team, the higher-ups simply do not care. If Overwatch esports cannot sustain itself on a skeleton budget, they are more than fine with letting it die entirely outside of third party tournaments in Asia and Saudi Arabia and third-tier college tournaments in the US and EU.
The one thing I really like about the new system is that it really opened the door for a much more diverse player pool. Koreans largely dominated OWL and OWCS has given a huge rise to a lot of European players. NA however still seems lacking through a multitude of factors (higher costs of living, Discord messages getting leaked, noticeable skill gaps on roles like tank and MS, etc).
I really hope blizzard takes some of the better development ideas we've been seeing in game with reacting to feedback and apply it to stuff like this. I hate watching OWCS its so weird and low quality matches. OWL was my go to background, like studying, working, cooking, or watching purely to watch. I hope they bring OWCS or something similar back to that old quality.
the fact that average OWL viewership was at least 25k with maybe 5k~ of genuine fans and not token farmers while OWCS Stage 3 only has 2k> viewers says a lot. Teams are always changing and disbanding. Its hard to connect to any teams because you dont know if their going to implode the next stage. There needs to be something done.
OWCS viewership for numerous regions has been consistently better than OWL. I feel this video portrays the OWL format as something sustainable when it was a proven failure. The regular season format is not kind or positive for viewership for most esports. This is has been shown for years
@@ZeroOne130 Which must be a minuscule amount of the player base. Sorry for you though. But I guess it made no sense to keep pushing it for the business.
@@ZeroOne130 I'm sorry to hear that mate. I haven't played since prime 2016-18 times. Man they were good memories. Between travelling a lot since then and hearing about the mess the game was in I haven't played Ow2. Hopefully they can fix it, or at least just revert back to OW1 with some balance patches.
My fucking GOAT Ocie. I have been watching every single video you released across the last couple months, keep it up bro, i dont even play the game anymore, i just love your understanding of the game.
I miss opening overwatch, looking at the games scheduled on owl for today, making predictions with my friends and then by the time we stop playing overwatch look how many we got right.
Found it super difficult to get my friends into watching OWCS NA and EU due to the schedule, but they were happy to stay up late and watch Korea just for the round robin regular season format whenever Falcons, CR or FTG plays. Also felt like the Korea format was way better though not perfect having only 2 LAN is also bad, the finals (and tbh the major) having only 8 teams and running purely off of crowd funding is a crime, and NA and EU not having a stage 2 and 4 LAN for the top teams qualifying is honestly tragic. If they can get into the ESL IEM/ESL One system like CS and other games, or try to get 3rd party tournament to fill the gaps, it would be much better. I hope this is just the experimentation year for feedback and next year OWCS would be drastically improved.
As a CS fan where tournament are generally run through qualification and not pre scheduled, I can navigate liquipedia to keep up with everything but not having a website also made it difficult for my friends to schedule some time to watch as well.
Esport orgs in all games should let pro players stream scrims! I see LAN events as just one big marketing event with small profit margins if any. Riot continues to fund lan events cause they see the value that these event brings; Marketing to get new players, existing players to play more hours, and in game cosmetics!
given the circumstance its in OWCS could be the best viewing esport solely because of the access to game replay codes and making them universally usable regardless of game patch would be absolutely huge. i dont get why theres so much work into designing a new system and the only hype/coverage from it was the initial launch and streamer reactions to it. theyre solely relying on popular streamers to promote it but theyre not choosing any that has a wider reach to a casual audience providing 0 growth. ironically supertf, despite barely being able to cover OWCS, was one of the biggest advertisers cause a lot of people found PGE through him and PGE + NRG Shock have been working their asses off trying to create content to promote their matches. and now that NRG Shock is out of EWC, i know a lot of people are just straight up not going to watch it cause theres 0 investment on top of the issues with the saudi government i wish shit could have been done right from the beginning
Just import the system from OWCS ASIA KOREA/JAPAN. Their OPENS is group stage, and their regular season has 9 teams round robin. It’s way better than swiss or tournament.
I was hesitant to view this as the title seemed a little doomer-y, but I'm glad i gave it a go, banger vid. I used to watch OWL religiously. Tuned into every single match, even rewatched games in the separate proplay viewer back in the old OWL days. One of the things that kept me watching was Avast's costreams, it gave this sense of connection between the progames and the community. When OWL died and Avast's costreams with it, I pretty much gave up on even trying to follow the pro scene. And so my interest in the game waned as well and I stopped even playing OW. But, then I discovered CommanderX's content and eventual costreams, and it re-lit my interest in the game and proscene. Costreams are a huge, inseparable part of my enjoyment of OW in general, but it has always felt like Blizz has barely bat an eye at any of the costreamers, even though i suspect for a lot of people like me, they're carrying the interest of die-hard fans in OW on their shoulders. Also the point about consistent, pre-announced game times is really important as well. Sorry for long-posting.
It's failing because OW isn't a competitive game anymore, it's made for casuals. When the playerbase doesn't take the game competitively, they won't bother taking esports seriously.
With the idea of making skins for teams why not do what LoL does and make skins for the big LAN tournament winners, that way people wanna support there teams for the skins and such. Maybe make spray and such for the teams that don't make it but are in the D1 or D2 teams. For the money maybe franchise D1 teams and you lose your franchise if you lose the season or enough seasons.
i miss the skins. when owl first came out they gave eveyone a free owl skin token. i got a spitfire genji skin bc i love profit i later even bought a widow london skin just to support
Tbh, I was a owl head since they said it was coming out, I was there for the highs and lows of the competitive side of the game, watched basically all matches live and the ones I was busy, I watched later, east or west, didnt matter, when it disappeared, I really was ready to embrace the new model, but after the first event I found myself with no idea of what was happening, when games where played, where games were played, then I started to fall out of the scene, now I couldnt care less about it, something I never thought I would say
The only way i watch OW Esports these days is through highly refined content like your analysis. I also don't care about the teams anymore. I don't know any of them. I'm more invested in players i still recognize from OWL.
Amazing video! I liked watching the Asia Quali but nothing more than that as I got confused how and what was gonna happen next, and you highlight the problem excellently. I did however like the recap/explanation after each match on what the strat was and all that As for sustainable income for content creators, I think it's also important to have the orgs for the teams get sponsors and advertise their team with them, do silly things and all that stuff ( similar to F1 has their drivers do tiktok n try to make them more personal to the viewer ) In addition, I haven't seen any of this happen but a short best moments or highlights of a match uploaded on the Esports channel of OW or the teams could go a long way too! ( I have to guess content creators sorta do this already but an official one would be nice and easy to access ) Ofc if the highlights would be shown in game or launcher, that would help as well, so people can quickly catch up on what's next instead of the hour long matches.
I think the actual viewing of matches is another issue they still have yet to figure out. It's gotten slightly better but there's still a lot of issues with spectating that I think if improved would make a lot more people interested in watching. As of now it's very difficult for someone not extremely versed in the game to even know what's going on half the time.
It won't fail because the saudi arabian government is backing Faceit and OWCS. I also want to point out that it is Team 4 who was responsible for designing the team skins, no one else. In order for Team 4 to design team skins for all the teams in OWCS they would need to be approached by all the teams, and only when all the teams have approached them, will they be able to design them their team skins and because there are more and more teams being entered into the Faceit structure, it's really not feasible. But, who knows. It might happen if they can milk the teams for enough money to make their skins. Blizzard is also an official Faceit partner, and they are doing LAN events in Saudi's capital city of Riyadh for multiple games, including Overwatch 2 right now, contrary to what you claimed at 0:37
I would argue the opposite in terms of the Saudi investment, not even taking into consideration how unethical it is. Money is being poured in, EWC is getting less than half the viewership of CAH. Both EWC and FACEIT League failed to accomplish their goals, FACEIT League having an especially poor format. I hope that Saudi Arabia divests in OW eSports due to this failure.
@@Coach_Ocie LAN events doesn't require high viewership to make it big. When doing LAN events, it's more depending on ticket sales, and when an arena is fully packed, then it's a win-win for the investors, regardless of viewerships. It's not a failure simply because you want it to be a failure ;)
@@Splashbang_OW The fact that we have accepted Saudi money is already a failure. It is a moral failure by default. And I'm not sure what you mean. FACEIT League signups were a failure, Season 2 has had especially low signups. FACEIT League barely had any officially casted matches and they rely on community casters. Both EWC and FACEIT League were advertising failures. Viewership is at record lows. Ticket sales do not make up for these failures. Production has also been especially poor for both FACEIT League playoffs and EWC. If you really believe EWC and FACEIT League were successes, taking Saudi out of the equation, you might need to take another look at the numbers and make an opinion afterwards.
@@Coach_Ocie “It is a moral failure” “The ethics of it” Calm down, Saudi Arabia isn’t some boogeyman its a country with a lot of money and a huge esports scene? They won two OW World Cup’s and proved themselves, you might dislike the politics of the country but the US has been hosting for ages and they’ve done worse around the world. Seriously if your entire point to call it a failure is “I disagree with this country” then you’re disregarding the economics which are core to any esports scene
@@kp5602thanks for pointing that out. I totally agree he seems biased against Saudi Arabia even though they are investing in a game that should have been dead by now just for the core of entertainment. Sad to see him saying LAN in Saudi Arabia is a bad thing just because of a country’s politics/culture disregarding anything towards the actual game
Thanks for all the content you create! Your channel is a golden mine! 3:10 OWCS swiss stage is kaotic, but it's comparable to Open division, fortunately we don't see 120 teams against each others. We just see the best, which are usually the same, at the end of every stage. According to you, why it's a wrong thing? Also, 15:28 It's prelly much similar to OWL then (However, OWL stopped for a reason, why OWCS with the OWL attributes would work? anyway, yes it would be way better
Yup and as a new player trying to find pro overwatch content its impossible to find by just searching on youtube Im just now putting the pieces together of what happened and why OW Esports is such a dumpster fire right now
Really interesting content. I hope Bliz can implement simple mecanisms to transit between the game and the esport (in-game links to matches, in-game pro teams' customization..). Having in-game teams customization can help pro team to support their financial issues. I'm french and I miss having a real cast FR which I had with OWL (thanks to Paris Eternal); now it's only co-stream which is less entertaining to watch. One good thing for OWCS is that EMEA players have more opportunities to play at T1 (OWL was almost only composed of KR/NA). OW is a really good game and I love watching OW esport but now Blizz/FaceIT need to put some effort to improve their product.
I’ll be honest I don’t watch overwatch and I’ll probably get hate for this but your proposed format seems worse. Aside from it not being broadcasted/advertised the current format seems good and functions like most other fps esports, qualifiers(Swiss in this case) for group stage that feeds into bracket play. Which I personally think is the best format to have for a competitive title.
It’s quite literally impossible to be a casual fan of the OWCS, Jesus Christ get a marketing student from your local community college and she could probably sell it better than Blizzard/the orgs themselves
letting go of bren and sideshow was the worst descision made by overwatch esports, since then really the talent no disrespect to them has been lackluster unfortunatley
I will elaborate: blizzard has completely remodeled its business approach to ow as a whole to try to squeeze any profit it can from the game. OWL was a dumpster fire that for them was a huge spending cost just for a small return in the bigger scheme of things. The result is something to keep fans happy and not completely pissed off about not having esports at all which is : OWCS
Addressing some of the things that might not be feasible: 1. More advertising and website app. They have no intention of growing owcs but just keep people happy. They have one intern working all the advertising for owcs to cut costs. Same thing with cosmetics. The budget for OWCS is probably very tight and has no intention of making a bigger expense out of it. IF they did decide to spend money it would go from prize pool money
Same I watched every season of OWL but lost interest once it ended. It is hard to keep watching when the product is a downgrade and the stakes feel way lower
I occasionally watched some owl back in the day. I heard it disbanded and thought overwatch was done as a major esport. I have no idea what the teams are anymore
Round Trip from Pittsburg to Dallas is like $430 - even on cheaper airlines like Frontier. You do realize travel involves more than just the flight (flight, lodging, transportation at location, food, etc.) and that airplane and hotel prices change like the stock market, right? If an OWCS event is happening in Dallas, then every hotel near the venue will raise their prices in anticipation of it and that will fan out into a wider area. The same thing happens all the time for events here. I can't find a single airline selling tickets for $200 round trip to Dallas out of any major metro area in this country. Even New Orleans is a $300 ticket. Maybe Houston? I didn't check those, because most people in Houston would just Drive to Dallas.
the more i hear asbout OW pro scene the more i come to realize being a pro player or collegiate isnt an acomplishment, this "e-sport" is a joke. Hero shooters arent meant to be competitive at all
I would say I'm definitely in a small minority of people who follows all the events, watches every uncoachable etc and I've been avid in the scene since the inauguration of Overwatch League but this new format is at the worse times (for me as a New Zealander) then ever before making the format impossible to follow.
also through watching the video I wonder if OWCS ever considered making one hero a team skin similar to what they did for Prideful Reinhardt in OWL S6 where each team had their own variant of the skin maybe OWCS could do something like that where the top 4 teams in a major get a recoloured legendary/epic skin with their team branding.
one thing I will say is owcs was kind of a last minute thing no? I mean owl ended in October last year and owcs was revealed January this year that's not a lot of time to flesh out the format so I hope it improves from here
Regular season for esports is an incredibly terrible format. The OWCS should be leaning towards the RLCS format. Not the format of RIOT esports which constantly gets lambasted for being stale and dull
i havent watched yet but im gonna say "segmentation of viewerbase due to streams on multiple channels(no true home for OWesports content,) lack of consistency, bad marketing" lets see if my thoughts hold up edit: yep, props to you for introducing solutions to the issues! somebody had to 😭😭
Crazy because all if not most of this already exists as "OWL".... tucked away somewhere... just copy and paste... most of the heavy work was done already
I haven't watched yet, but am I the only one who doesn't understand the competition system?? I would do something to the league of legends league or even inpire in sports like basketball or football (regular league with a couple of divisons and maybe something like the UCL)
ngl pge atm is the goat of owcs yeah hes not the best player but everyone knows him and probally is the only reason (+ a few others mainly those on nrg) are keeping owccs alive. Love the video ocie, keep it up! Hope your having a good day and if not a good day then at least take a cookie/ biscuit 🍪 becaue you are amazong!
Modern OW esports is just more boring than ever before, even when soj was busted at least people like proper were demons and enjoyable to watch, in the current meta you’d be hard pressed to find a tank player that isn’t playing mauga or orisa and while genji play is great for viewers, it’s super volatile
why would we watch something that offers no excitement followed owl closely for 3 years and i cant even be bothered to open a stream of this new pile of disappointment
"would be easy to implement" Never like hearing that from someone doesn't work on the team. You have no idea what's easy or hard. Doubt anything is easy for them either with so many layoffs and highers ups now forcing generative AI onto the devs.
They already executed over half of the suggestions I provide in this video for OWL. They have the framework they have the process, and if they need to hire more staff they can. They've made team skins and cosmetics before, they've made an app/website before, they've run regular season matches before. I don't fully understand your point when it is clear that Blizzard could easily decide to implement these changes if they would prefer to.
I have directly communicated with tournament staff in the past, I know for a fact that several members of the OWCS staff team watch my videos and are subscribed to me, and I've helped them make improvements to previous broadcasts with outreach on Twitter. This will be heard, it's a matter of what they take from it.
This might sound mean but it comes from at good place. Why are you argueing about becoming more like owl when that failed with so much more investment then we are gonna get for owcs, I loved owl but why do we have to reapet it? Lets give other formats and things a try, an open landscape like cs have or dota used to have would be increadibly to see in ow (its what we had before owl and its mostly rememberd fodly with apex as its crowing jewl). We cant expact blizzard to help us or save us when they have reapedly showed us they dont understand how to make a good esports product, ow, starcraft and heros of the storm being exampels of their failure, and why should blizzard help make pros salary better. Yes its better for the sport if more player are getting payed better but its not like contanders or open division teams hade huge bags of cash, esports roots are that its only for glory people used to spend more money than they made too come and play at an event why cant we try too make ow grow as a grass roots esports, why should blizzard have the keys to the castle when they are incompetent. Let third partys run the space, its worked for so many other esports why does we have to be different when its not working, owl failed owcs gonna fail and we still dont learn. Its sad how we are the laughting stock of the esports world and yet we dont seam to care about changing
PGE carrying the marketing for OWCS
hes litetally the ONLY reason i watch lmao hes actually funny af🤣
he's in the owcs? 😂😂 damn bro is insane
@@phitc4242 gonna assume ur joking, but if not, he's probably like the 2nd best hitscan in NA amd arguably first cause sometimes he is better than seeker other times not
@@marce1_1 I legit did not know he was in OWCS, but then again, I don't follow it (gotta play myself u know). just seen some videos of his. he's a funny dude for sure
@@phitc4242 ah, fair enough then.
i know it wasnt perfect, but god i miss the owl app
I also think Pick em was a fun app to compare your preds with other poepel online easily and it was just a fun easy way kind of like when you made preds for an upcoming sports tourtamnet like NBA Playoff or World Cup etc
something i'd also like to mention that was brought up when owcs was announced, under-age talent is dead with the death of contenders and od. a large portion of the players who compete today were competing at a very young age in contenders. if i look at crazy raccoons, chorong started competing at 15, heesang at 14/15, junbin at 14, lip at 16, max at 15, and shu at 17. it feels like this new system makes it so hard for talent to develop. and that's in a scene where the talent is literally all retiring because of the new system. how will we replace our old top level talent when its so hard to even develop new ones? like, in na, toronto and m80 basically have all the t1 talent left, and that's like 8 players 😭. and even then they're still losing players to retirement. lyar might be retiring, and let's be honest coluge really dgaf he just there because they're at winthrop and needed a tank.
You dont . You get for fun turnerments OW as a game has no new players comeing in period .
this video needs to be seen by a higher-up at blizzard
higher than what?
@@its_lucky2526 higher-up
/ˌhʌɪərˈʌp/
nouninformal
noun: higher-up; plural noun: higher-ups
a senior person in an organization.
@@its_lucky2526 higher-up refers to people in charge of running the company
Given reports that Overwatch isn't making enough money to even qualify for bonuses for its dev team, the higher-ups simply do not care. If Overwatch esports cannot sustain itself on a skeleton budget, they are more than fine with letting it die entirely outside of third party tournaments in Asia and Saudi Arabia and third-tier college tournaments in the US and EU.
@@jeremyfuster7570 i know man.. just wishful thinking..
The one thing I really like about the new system is that it really opened the door for a much more diverse player pool. Koreans largely dominated OWL and OWCS has given a huge rise to a lot of European players. NA however still seems lacking through a multitude of factors (higher costs of living, Discord messages getting leaked, noticeable skill gaps on roles like tank and MS, etc).
Definitely a better environment for EMEA, I agree! It would be really nice to see the format improve and see how much farther EMEA players can go :)
you simply cannot expect NA players to go without being cancelled when their culture is toxic like it is. no fun allowed.
@@peakerbox Not aware of the situation, but what was the "fun" that got them cancelled?
@@eleonarcrimson858 Probably shit young people do, what do you even expect?
@@GK-ut9nc oh I didn't know young people were just crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed every time.
I used to love owl, PGE was the only reason I knew about owcs 😭
I really hope blizzard takes some of the better development ideas we've been seeing in game with reacting to feedback and apply it to stuff like this. I hate watching OWCS its so weird and low quality matches. OWL was my go to background, like studying, working, cooking, or watching purely to watch. I hope they bring OWCS or something similar back to that old quality.
I remember saying this to some people a year ago, but OWL ending so far has been more detrimental than helpful to OW Esports.
the fact that average OWL viewership was at least 25k with maybe 5k~ of genuine fans and not token farmers while OWCS Stage 3 only has 2k> viewers says a lot. Teams are always changing and disbanding. Its hard to connect to any teams because you dont know if their going to implode the next stage. There needs to be something done.
OWCS viewership for numerous regions has been consistently better than OWL. I feel this video portrays the OWL format as something sustainable when it was a proven failure. The regular season format is not kind or positive for viewership for most esports. This is has been shown for years
Blizzard doesn’t have direction anymore. By cutting OWL and PVE, most players don’t have a reason to stay loyal to the game we used to love
You used to love OW for the PVE?
@@ZeroOne130 Which must be a minuscule amount of the player base. Sorry for you though. But I guess it made no sense to keep pushing it for the business.
@@ZeroOne130 I'm sorry to hear that mate. I haven't played since prime 2016-18 times. Man they were good memories. Between travelling a lot since then and hearing about the mess the game was in I haven't played Ow2. Hopefully they can fix it, or at least just revert back to OW1 with some balance patches.
My fucking GOAT Ocie. I have been watching every single video you released across the last couple months, keep it up bro, i dont even play the game anymore, i just love your understanding of the game.
pge mentioned 🥳🥳🥳
Who?
the japan and korea format is actually quite good imo. a lot of ppl don’t agree with me on that but like… it just is
I miss opening overwatch, looking at the games scheduled on owl for today, making predictions with my friends and then by the time we stop playing overwatch look how many we got right.
Found it super difficult to get my friends into watching OWCS NA and EU due to the schedule, but they were happy to stay up late and watch Korea just for the round robin regular season format whenever Falcons, CR or FTG plays. Also felt like the Korea format was way better though not perfect having only 2 LAN is also bad, the finals (and tbh the major) having only 8 teams and running purely off of crowd funding is a crime, and NA and EU not having a stage 2 and 4 LAN for the top teams qualifying is honestly tragic. If they can get into the ESL IEM/ESL One system like CS and other games, or try to get 3rd party tournament to fill the gaps, it would be much better. I hope this is just the experimentation year for feedback and next year OWCS would be drastically improved.
As a CS fan where tournament are generally run through qualification and not pre scheduled, I can navigate liquipedia to keep up with everything but not having a website also made it difficult for my friends to schedule some time to watch as well.
Esport orgs in all games should let pro players stream scrims! I see LAN events as just one big marketing event with small profit margins if any. Riot continues to fund lan events cause they see the value that these event brings; Marketing to get new players, existing players to play more hours, and in game cosmetics!
given the circumstance its in OWCS could be the best viewing esport solely because of the access to game replay codes and making them universally usable regardless of game patch would be absolutely huge. i dont get why theres so much work into designing a new system and the only hype/coverage from it was the initial launch and streamer reactions to it. theyre solely relying on popular streamers to promote it but theyre not choosing any that has a wider reach to a casual audience providing 0 growth. ironically supertf, despite barely being able to cover OWCS, was one of the biggest advertisers cause a lot of people found PGE through him and PGE + NRG Shock have been working their asses off trying to create content to promote their matches. and now that NRG Shock is out of EWC, i know a lot of people are just straight up not going to watch it cause theres 0 investment on top of the issues with the saudi government
i wish shit could have been done right from the beginning
Just import the system from OWCS ASIA KOREA/JAPAN.
Their OPENS is group stage, and their regular season has 9 teams round robin.
It’s way better than swiss or tournament.
My main issue with owcs is that all of my favorite players are in Korea but I'm not gonna stay up late to watch them live
Honestly, I agree with every point you have made. It is amazing to see all these points well thought out and examples provided
I was hesitant to view this as the title seemed a little doomer-y, but I'm glad i gave it a go, banger vid. I used to watch OWL religiously. Tuned into every single match, even rewatched games in the separate proplay viewer back in the old OWL days. One of the things that kept me watching was Avast's costreams, it gave this sense of connection between the progames and the community.
When OWL died and Avast's costreams with it, I pretty much gave up on even trying to follow the pro scene. And so my interest in the game waned as well and I stopped even playing OW.
But, then I discovered CommanderX's content and eventual costreams, and it re-lit my interest in the game and proscene. Costreams are a huge, inseparable part of my enjoyment of OW in general, but it has always felt like Blizz has barely bat an eye at any of the costreamers, even though i suspect for a lot of people like me, they're carrying the interest of die-hard fans in OW on their shoulders.
Also the point about consistent, pre-announced game times is really important as well. Sorry for long-posting.
It's failing because OW isn't a competitive game anymore, it's made for casuals.
When the playerbase doesn't take the game competitively, they won't bother taking esports seriously.
With the idea of making skins for teams why not do what LoL does and make skins for the big LAN tournament winners, that way people wanna support there teams for the skins and such. Maybe make spray and such for the teams that don't make it but are in the D1 or D2 teams. For the money maybe franchise D1 teams and you lose your franchise if you lose the season or enough seasons.
i miss the skins. when owl first came out they gave eveyone a free owl skin token. i got a spitfire genji skin bc i love profit
i later even bought a widow london skin just to support
The tournament by tournament format has been used effectively by other games like counter strike, so my guess is that where they got the idea from
Tbh, I was a owl head since they said it was coming out, I was there for the highs and lows of the competitive side of the game, watched basically all matches live and the ones I was busy, I watched later, east or west, didnt matter, when it disappeared, I really was ready to embrace the new model, but after the first event I found myself with no idea of what was happening, when games where played, where games were played, then I started to fall out of the scene, now I couldnt care less about it, something I never thought I would say
As a counter strike fan, just do an open circuit lmao.
YO SPIT
as somebody who wants to be an overwatch pro, im scared for the future of this games esports.
tomathan is the half the owcs marketing
Thought this was gonna be clickbaity and say some obvious things, but no. Genuinely really good and insightful video. I hope change comes.
I miss the team themed skins, they were my favourite part of OWL stuff
The only way i watch OW Esports these days is through highly refined content like your analysis.
I also don't care about the teams anymore. I don't know any of them. I'm more invested in players i still recognize from OWL.
Amazing video! I liked watching the Asia Quali but nothing more than that as I got confused how and what was gonna happen next, and you highlight the problem excellently. I did however like the recap/explanation after each match on what the strat was and all that
As for sustainable income for content creators, I think it's also important to have the orgs for the teams get sponsors and advertise their team with them, do silly things and all that stuff ( similar to F1 has their drivers do tiktok n try to make them more personal to the viewer )
In addition, I haven't seen any of this happen but a short best moments or highlights of a match uploaded on the Esports channel of OW or the teams could go a long way too! ( I have to guess content creators sorta do this already but an official one would be nice and easy to access ) Ofc if the highlights would be shown in game or launcher, that would help as well, so people can quickly catch up on what's next instead of the hour long matches.
I think the actual viewing of matches is another issue they still have yet to figure out. It's gotten slightly better but there's still a lot of issues with spectating that I think if improved would make a lot more people interested in watching. As of now it's very difficult for someone not extremely versed in the game to even know what's going on half the time.
It won't fail because the saudi arabian government is backing Faceit and OWCS.
I also want to point out that it is Team 4 who was responsible for designing the team skins, no one else. In order for Team 4 to design team skins for all the teams in OWCS they would need to be approached by all the teams, and only when all the teams have approached them, will they be able to design them their team skins and because there are more and more teams being entered into the Faceit structure, it's really not feasible. But, who knows. It might happen if they can milk the teams for enough money to make their skins.
Blizzard is also an official Faceit partner, and they are doing LAN events in Saudi's capital city of Riyadh for multiple games, including Overwatch 2 right now, contrary to what you claimed at 0:37
I would argue the opposite in terms of the Saudi investment, not even taking into consideration how unethical it is.
Money is being poured in, EWC is getting less than half the viewership of CAH. Both EWC and FACEIT League failed to accomplish their goals, FACEIT League having an especially poor format. I hope that Saudi Arabia divests in OW eSports due to this failure.
@@Coach_Ocie LAN events doesn't require high viewership to make it big. When doing LAN events, it's more depending on ticket sales, and when an arena is fully packed, then it's a win-win for the investors, regardless of viewerships.
It's not a failure simply because you want it to be a failure ;)
@@Splashbang_OW The fact that we have accepted Saudi money is already a failure. It is a moral failure by default.
And I'm not sure what you mean. FACEIT League signups were a failure, Season 2 has had especially low signups. FACEIT League barely had any officially casted matches and they rely on community casters.
Both EWC and FACEIT League were advertising failures. Viewership is at record lows. Ticket sales do not make up for these failures. Production has also been especially poor for both FACEIT League playoffs and EWC.
If you really believe EWC and FACEIT League were successes, taking Saudi out of the equation, you might need to take another look at the numbers and make an opinion afterwards.
@@Coach_Ocie
“It is a moral failure”
“The ethics of it”
Calm down, Saudi Arabia isn’t some boogeyman its a country with a lot of money and a huge esports scene? They won two OW World Cup’s and proved themselves, you might dislike the politics of the country but the US has been hosting for ages and they’ve done worse around the world.
Seriously if your entire point to call it a failure is “I disagree with this country” then you’re disregarding the economics which are core to any esports scene
@@kp5602thanks for pointing that out. I totally agree he seems biased against Saudi Arabia even though they are investing in a game that should have been dead by now just for the core of entertainment. Sad to see him saying LAN in Saudi Arabia is a bad thing just because of a country’s politics/culture disregarding anything towards the actual game
Coach Ocie always making top tier content! You love to see it!
Thanks for all the content you create! Your channel is a golden mine!
3:10 OWCS swiss stage is kaotic, but it's comparable to Open division, fortunately we don't see 120 teams against each others. We just see the best, which are usually the same, at the end of every stage. According to you, why it's a wrong thing?
Also, 15:28 It's prelly much similar to OWL then (However, OWL stopped for a reason, why OWCS with the OWL attributes would work? anyway, yes it would be way better
I would watch it but i literally dont know when the matches are or where to watch them.
Yup and as a new player trying to find pro overwatch content its impossible to find by just searching on youtube
Im just now putting the pieces together of what happened and why OW Esports is such a dumpster fire right now
Random idea. The winning teams get to issue one champion skin per player, which they can sell for a ton of money and offers great publicity.
Theyll never do that because of sinatra
Really interesting content. I hope Bliz can implement simple mecanisms to transit between the game and the esport (in-game links to matches, in-game pro teams' customization..). Having in-game teams customization can help pro team to support their financial issues. I'm french and I miss having a real cast FR which I had with OWL (thanks to Paris Eternal); now it's only co-stream which is less entertaining to watch. One good thing for OWCS is that EMEA players have more opportunities to play at T1 (OWL was almost only composed of KR/NA). OW is a really good game and I love watching OW esport but now Blizz/FaceIT need to put some effort to improve their product.
You earned yourself a ride or die subscriber as a hugh OW esports fan this is whats REALLY needed
Seeing what happened to overwatch and deciding to be pro is your own life mistake we cant make up for.
I’ll be honest I don’t watch overwatch and I’ll probably get hate for this but your proposed format seems worse. Aside from it not being broadcasted/advertised the current format seems good and functions like most other fps esports, qualifiers(Swiss in this case) for group stage that feeds into bracket play. Which I personally think is the best format to have for a competitive title.
Commeting here to boost the algorithm. Fantastic video by the Goat Ocie
It’s quite literally impossible to be a casual fan of the OWCS, Jesus Christ get a marketing student from your local community college and she could probably sell it better than Blizzard/the orgs themselves
i played overwatch 1&2 in the most casual way, and as long as team battles in pro league look like lsd trips I'm not watching them.
letting go of bren and sideshow was the worst descision made by overwatch esports, since then really the talent no disrespect to them has been lackluster unfortunatley
There is one reason to why competitive overwatch is failing: it was never meant to succeed. Simple.
I will elaborate: blizzard has completely remodeled its business approach to ow as a whole to try to squeeze any profit it can from the game. OWL was a dumpster fire that for them was a huge spending cost just for a small return in the bigger scheme of things. The result is something to keep fans happy and not completely pissed off about not having esports at all which is : OWCS
Addressing some of the things that might not be feasible: 1. More advertising and website app. They have no intention of growing owcs but just keep people happy. They have one intern working all the advertising for owcs to cut costs. Same thing with cosmetics. The budget for OWCS is probably very tight and has no intention of making a bigger expense out of it. IF they did decide to spend money it would go from prize pool money
i wish i feel as connected and attached to the players and teams in owcs as i did in owl
Same I watched every season of OWL but lost interest once it ended. It is hard to keep watching when the product is a downgrade and the stakes feel way lower
Amazing video as usual.
Getting rid of OWL imo was a mistake like what are we even doing?
I occasionally watched some owl back in the day. I heard it disbanded and thought overwatch was done as a major esport. I have no idea what the teams are anymore
It's definitely difficult to follow
The format isn't the problem same format in many other esports with high success
Asking the company that has still yet to give the player base the 10 avoid slots is….
Round Trip from Pittsburg to Dallas is like $430 - even on cheaper airlines like Frontier. You do realize travel involves more than just the flight (flight, lodging, transportation at location, food, etc.) and that airplane and hotel prices change like the stock market, right? If an OWCS event is happening in Dallas, then every hotel near the venue will raise their prices in anticipation of it and that will fan out into a wider area. The same thing happens all the time for events here. I can't find a single airline selling tickets for $200 round trip to Dallas out of any major metro area in this country. Even New Orleans is a $300 ticket. Maybe Houston? I didn't check those, because most people in Houston would just Drive to Dallas.
competition would increase too if everyone posted scrims
The Ocie video everyone needed
the more i hear asbout OW pro scene the more i come to realize being a pro player or collegiate isnt an acomplishment, this "e-sport" is a joke. Hero shooters arent meant to be competitive at all
Collegiate is worth it, free college in the United States is beyond valuable.
Imagine “content bonuses” that teams could cash in on when streaming out of stage scrims and pumping content
I would say I'm definitely in a small minority of people who follows all the events, watches every uncoachable etc and I've been avid in the scene since the inauguration of Overwatch League but this new format is at the worse times (for me as a New Zealander) then ever before making the format impossible to follow.
also through watching the video I wonder if OWCS ever considered making one hero a team skin similar to what they did for Prideful Reinhardt in OWL S6 where each team had their own variant of the skin maybe OWCS could do something like that where the top 4 teams in a major get a recoloured legendary/epic skin with their team branding.
keep these great videos coming !!!
I think OW players need to look at Apex Legends streamers and how much they stream scrims and competitions, it'd go so hard
Reason; OW2
/thread
whats with that zesty liquipedia image??
Most of these ideas are reasonable. Especially the emphasis on content creation amongst teams
one thing I will say is owcs was kind of a last minute thing no? I mean owl ended in October last year and owcs was revealed January this year that's not a lot of time to flesh out the format so I hope it improves from here
a lot of good stuff here. hopefully some of these things will be implemented in the next season :)
I feel like they just don't care about esports much, production quality is also quite bad
What is the difference between the base game and the version the pros get in LAN? Why even use a different version in the first place?
Regular season for esports is an incredibly terrible format. The OWCS should be leaning towards the RLCS format. Not the format of RIOT esports which constantly gets lambasted for being stale and dull
i havent watched yet but im gonna say "segmentation of viewerbase due to streams on multiple channels(no true home for OWesports content,) lack of consistency, bad marketing" lets see if my thoughts hold up
edit: yep, props to you for introducing solutions to the issues! somebody had to 😭😭
Crazy because all if not most of this already exists as "OWL".... tucked away somewhere... just copy and paste... most of the heavy work was done already
The viewing experience has never been good in overwatch period
so essentially make it into a soccer league system. that makes sense
I haven't watched yet, but am I the only one who doesn't understand the competition system?? I would do something to the league of legends league or even inpire in sports like basketball or football (regular league with a couple of divisons and maybe something like the UCL)
ngl pge atm is the goat of owcs yeah hes not the best player but everyone knows him and probally is the only reason (+ a few others mainly those on nrg) are keeping owccs alive.
Love the video ocie, keep it up! Hope your having a good day and if not a good day then at least take a cookie/ biscuit 🍪 becaue you are amazong!
WAIT A MINUTE SHES COOKING
i didnt even know owcs was a thing as a top 500 player
great video bro❤
really hoping owcs gets restructured like this, great video ty
"here's why"? Maybe blizzard nuking the owl? Like what do you mean
Modern OW esports is just more boring than ever before, even when soj was busted at least people like proper were demons and enjoyable to watch, in the current meta you’d be hard pressed to find a tank player that isn’t playing mauga or orisa and while genji play is great for viewers, it’s super volatile
why would we watch something that offers no excitement
followed owl closely for 3 years and i cant even be bothered to open a stream of this new pile of disappointment
All of this wont ever happen OW as a game is just colapsing on it self .
Sigh, Blizzard what have you done.
im usually really good with esports but owcs loses me
"would be easy to implement" Never like hearing that from someone doesn't work on the team. You have no idea what's easy or hard. Doubt anything is easy for them either with so many layoffs and highers ups now forcing generative AI onto the devs.
They already executed over half of the suggestions I provide in this video for OWL. They have the framework they have the process, and if they need to hire more staff they can.
They've made team skins and cosmetics before, they've made an app/website before, they've run regular season matches before. I don't fully understand your point when it is clear that Blizzard could easily decide to implement these changes if they would prefer to.
thank you Oice :3
They need to ADVERTISE. Why do they do nothing? 😂
Great vid, hopefully it reaches some employees
Y'all remember when blizzard ran they esports themselves.... and how much people hated..... look at it now
Blizzard run OWCS? It's done by the same people with a reduced staff.
@@Coach_Ocie OWCS is run by faceit with Blizzard Supplying staff
what do you think of coach cuffy
Ow has become less and less of a competitive game since ow2 came out
i just want an owcs for my region 😢
tomathan and pge is literally only why i care
I was itching for a new vid
W video, however no one meaningful will ever see this
I have directly communicated with tournament staff in the past, I know for a fact that several members of the OWCS staff team watch my videos and are subscribed to me, and I've helped them make improvements to previous broadcasts with outreach on Twitter.
This will be heard, it's a matter of what they take from it.
I Wana rep my favorite team in game but we have no cosmetics blizzard step up it’s not a ton of work!
The name OWCS sucks
Very confusing for people new to Overwatch
Sounds like a limited event
Just RETVRN to OWL much more marketable
This might sound mean but it comes from at good place. Why are you argueing about becoming more like owl when that failed with so much more investment then we are gonna get for owcs, I loved owl but why do we have to reapet it? Lets give other formats and things a try, an open landscape like cs have or dota used to have would be increadibly to see in ow (its what we had before owl and its mostly rememberd fodly with apex as its crowing jewl). We cant expact blizzard to help us or save us when they have reapedly showed us they dont understand how to make a good esports product, ow, starcraft and heros of the storm being exampels of their failure, and why should blizzard help make pros salary better. Yes its better for the sport if more player are getting payed better but its not like contanders or open division teams hade huge bags of cash, esports roots are that its only for glory people used to spend more money than they made too come and play at an event why cant we try too make ow grow as a grass roots esports, why should blizzard have the keys to the castle when they are incompetent. Let third partys run the space, its worked for so many other esports why does we have to be different when its not working, owl failed owcs gonna fail and we still dont learn. Its sad how we are the laughting stock of the esports world and yet we dont seam to care about changing