Blizz asking for $20 million franchise fee for OWL

http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/19347153/sources-teams-hesitant-buy-overwatch-league

Blizzard what the fuck are you doing

I think the successful launch of OW made their head too big and want it to resemble a traditional sports league too much when in reality its just not that

Just looks like a combination of greedy and stupid at this point. I really wanna see OWL succeed as the games future as a high tier eSport basically demands it. However, without success I could see it falling into more a B tier esport for the rest of its lifespan.

Unless they get the entire NFL to buy into OW this scene is fucked

Guys better to go back into TF2. Alert Admirable and Sideshow too

Blizzard is actually trying to bring in big investors from the very start rather than work their way up. I wonder how this will play out, but considering we don't know the benefits of the buy-ins it's unfair to assume blizzard doesn't know what their doing... I'm trying to keep a PMA...

I'm not sure if they are extremely overconfident in one of the games that has a smaller esports following or if they are just trying to make a quick buck and run with it, either way this doesn't seem like a good idea considering that the currently most popular esports title has a about 20x smaller buy in.

I want to know who's behind these decisions! Then I can look up his/her past accomplishments and decide whether or not to believe. I want to believe, fam.

So THAT would explain all the dropped teams.

bowswer5 [#5]

Unless they get the entire NFL to buy into OW this scene is fucked

they'll only get 31/32 teams, GBs owners wont fork money over for that

hugo [#9]

I want to know who's behind these decisions! Then I can look up his/her past accomplishments and decide whether or not to believe. I want to believe, fam.

Well for Blizzard's previous e-sports accomplishments:
They killed the Warcraft 3 scene, stopped all patching/balancing once SC2 development was underway despite all pro's giving numerous complaints and feedback on how to create more diversity in the game(It just ended up being same units/builds every time).
They killed Brood War (Wanted direct control over Kespa which is the Korean organization that bred and ran the scene, forced OGN to give SC2 prime time slots over BW and have BW matches broadcast afterwards, forced Kespa + any Broodwar tournament organizations to also host SC2 tournies with larger prize pools making all BW teams and pros switch over to SC2).
They did their best to kill the SC2 korean scene (Created a WCS system barring Koreans from participating in North American or European tournaments unless they were citizens of a country in those continents except for a couple of special Global events run by Blizzard. They said the reason for this was that Korean's were too good and had an unfair advantage over the rest of the world since they had established pro teams from Starcraft Broodwar and wanted homegrown North American talent to prosper more. This caused almost all the Korean pro teams to disband as there wasn't enough money in their scene anymore.

So those are a few of Blizzard's e-sports credentials. Now with OWL it looks like there is a pattern emerging - they always want full control for themselves, they substantially prefer homegrown North American talent to the rest of the world, and they want the majority of the money being made from the scene to go back to their pockets. It doesn't look good though I'll still have my fingers crossed that it somehow ends up succeeding.

bombs

the plot, it thickens: https://esports.yahoo.com/blizzard-officially-responds-overwatch-league-rumors-190546691.html

Blizzard haven't actually denied any of the claims in the reports but are strongly hinting that the sources are on the other side of the bargaining table and therefore benefit from crafting the narrative against Blizzard. At least that seems to be my take on it.

¨~ Bring Back TF2.Tv ¨~