Several players and staff retire or go on hiatus

Several players and staff formerly in the Overwatch League or previously on Contenders teams have announced their retirements or that they are going on hiatus. The list of people doing so include Taimou , ShaDowBurn , Sugarfree , Kyb , sharyk , Gods , Phaz , maid and Carter .

Of the players on that list, ShaDowBurn and Carter are not fully retiring yet. ShaDowBurn has not ruled out returning to Overwatch. Carter said he will finish out this Contenders season with Third Impact. Third Impact won the most recent Contenders tournament.

Taimou, Kyb, Sharyk, ShaDowBurn and GODS all made the Overwatch Leauge at some point in their careers. The latter four were not re-signed by their teams in the offseason and have not played for an Overwatch League or Contenders team since. Taimou took a step down from the Dallas Fuel in January to join Team Envy in Contenders, but he did not play a Contenders match this season.

Sugarfree is the youngest person among the notable retirees, doing so at just 15-years-old. He was a member of ATL Academy until they were dropped a few weeks ago.

Maid is the lone coach on this list. He has flirted with retirement off and on previously but said he plans to move on to VALORANT now.

Phaz was with a team 9-1 in Open Division at the time of his retirement. He has been on a number of Contenders teams the last few years and was last in Contenders in 2019 with Phase 2.

A few other players from the Montreal Rebellion also retired today. This includes DPS Leaf , off-tank Shuh , analyst and manager Tanizhq and possibly main tank numlocked . numlocked has said he is still open to offers.

Friezareturns

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Valorant is showing more promise and people are interested in that, OverWatch is frankly a unsupported game across the board: Tier 2/3 payment has been downplayed for a while {outcry on twitter suggest heavily the case} as well as financial management + transition from Tier 2/3 to Tier 1 with all the team coaches/players, dozens of folks who were in OWL like Taimou never got the play time he wanted and even when they did; it wasn't much. It's a shame because Act/Blizz doesn't seen the problem with this and come forward (they won't anyway) and would prefer their glorified OW2 not expansion to save the main game instead. Even now I still don't agree with this decision on the premise that pve stuff could still be garbage and change nothing. This months out even a year later more than likely with corona halting the gaming industry most of the companies have to serious delay games due to not having home equipment/timezone differences and no means to finance the outcome of this passing (personally I'm hoping OW2 is delayed so it teaches either Act/Blizzard or both a lesson that they can't depend on OWL viewership to appease the 99% player base especially with the fact that Echo came out in the worst time possible and Blizzard realized this feedback, its really been negative to say the least. I should note that as a DPS player I honestly did not want Echo, I didn't want to see her nor be released, they just aren't listening and it's why the game user base has a huge disconnect versus the developers. The game is polarizing when it happens and why the forums, reddit, and everywhere else there is so much outcry/hatred to me, its justified due to the tract record think back at the times when they could patch stuff faster or refocus the ranked ladder, not much reason and them saying "well genji and soldier are great in GM" missing the point that the regular user base ISN'T IN GM and it's also undermines the fact that people are seeing these decisions you are making for your game, we are playing you're game, we paid for and you are saying stuff like that? and you wonder why folks are leaving. They are fed up with this.

Plus it seems Valorant wants to support people from the forefront who weren't able to enjoy OW or play it to the fullest of their potential from the get go day 1; young to old and anyone in between. It's really sad because prior to these e-sports "leagues", 2nd/3rd party tournaments were a regular norm w/o destroying the integrity of low ends of professional play but it seems that with going forward with massive gaming leagues that it doesn't seem its worth the sacrifice as orgs are either dropping out or moving on. Sugarfree wouldn't likely get into OWL no matter what, he's 15 now even still; it's 2+ years out and OWL may not even be the same anymore by that point.

Minor aside: I'm sure that with any new game there is a likely hood it could succeed and fail but for so far this is what I'm seeing currently.

Hiagain

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I guess since I dont follow other games, I've never been aware of how well they support tier 2/3. I guess it surprises me that they are apparently supported much more.

kingpug

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I love Blizzard in general but the way they handled OW was a disgrace and because of that I hope they suffer for it. On the other hand don't expect Valorant to live up to the hype, reminds me of Apex where everyone got all excited saying this and that, now what?

ideekae

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I expect Valorant to take off not because the game is good but because riot knows what they’re doing when it comes to esports.

Sdku

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Overwatch's decline is solely the fault of Blizzard's horrible mismanagement.

kingpug

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I just wonder what all these owners who pumped millions into the league are thinking, I mean I saw games had around 50k viewers on YT it probably peaked but higher even then, that's a bit low for something that costs as much money as the OWL did. I'm not even sure if moving away from Twitch was the best option as well, sure YT might pay more but did the league need MORE money at the expense of a fanbase?

No idea why Blizzard didn't just look at CS and copy that as much as possible, you've got a shitload of LAN events to take part in and it also caters to multiple tiers of the game, you've still got young players coming through the tiers and getting into the big teams yet in OW everyone is retiring.

SilkCloud

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Honestly, I personally like youtube better since if I tune in too late into the match I can just go back to the beginning and watch it when it is live.

kingpug

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Agreed, but when you've used Twitch since the start of OW and you're getting 100k on average for every stream swapping to Youtube that let's be honest is not even close to Twitch in terms of actual streaming is madness.

Frozello

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To be fair Season 3 was meant to be break or make it year for OWL, but with recent events it's really hard to expect this year to be it, but next year with OW2 is really last chance. Sure would expect higher viewership numbers than current 40-50k, but chat is filled with kids spamming "Get back to Twitch" and all that non-sense so, if it's mostly those people gone... I'm happy, but someone else might not be happy :)