I've translated Nate Nanzer's recent interview about the Chinese OW scene.
Translation: https://pastebin.com/0xWH8vA2
I've translated Nate Nanzer's recent interview about the Chinese OW scene.
Translation: https://pastebin.com/0xWH8vA2
thx for translation
(chinese ow scene)
Q2 total bs, only more tournaments might benefit financially teams but argument with owl contenders and open is false coz this is a lot less tournaments than this and last year
Q3 "they dont know why teams are disbanding and players leaving"
just stop, total bs, outside of owl and contenders (which future was not sure for a long time) there are no tournaments, not only this but in 2017 they killed a lot of thriving tournaments (most notably amm)
and for organisations who are not in owl it just doesnt make sense to be in overwatch at all
(owl)
Q1 i like splitting revenue but im curious how will they decide how much each team gets or do they all get same amount?
dislike focusing on "local" sponsors and fans, esports great streanght is that teams have fans all around the world and this just might make it hard for fans from different regions to for example buy merchandise of their favourit team and as youll see these teams generally online (around the world) local sponsors dont gain much for being "local"
Let me be blunt (and yes I know many won't like what I say), the truth is, Blizzard simply doesn't care.
They care about their game of course, it's their top product at the moment, but they don't look at it from a real "esport" point of view, someone in there (being it Nate or some other shot caller) just wants to turn esports into "traditional sports".
Why? I imagine there are variopus reasons:
They want full control of what's surrounding OW, so in their eyes many small tournaments are bad, better have less torunaments and have them all under their "umbrella".
They are very American, in an eighties kind of way, so their focus is of course on NA, the rest is, let's say second class (please if you are from the States don't take this personally, things have changed, but people my age or older grew up in that era)
But the real reason is of course "da money", classic esport organizations are by no means finacial colossues, so what Blizzard wants is... well the actual big guys to buy into their game... they see it like the NBA or NFL, the problem is... OW, like all other esports is not the NBA.
In the end they might be right and everything will work out well, I doubt it, but that's just my personal opinion.
p.s. btw thanks for the translation mate!
partly i agree partly not
the reason for why they want to turn overwatch into traditional sport is to make more money yes but every company is in esport for profit so nothing new
many western (and specially cis organizations for example virtus pro which early this year got 40 million $ in investments) are really big right now and they will continue to grow unlike traditional sports which dont grow
i really agree with them acting very american (but id say its more like 60s/70s) and its a mistake imho, in eu and korea every tournament has huge live audience filling huge arenas in na not always
All your points are valid, what I'm left wondering is, how much are the players actually paid?
The moment star players will start getting paid like LBJ or Steph Curry (Messi or Ronaldo if we speak of football) I'll give up and admit Blizzard was right and I was completely wrong.
As of now I really can't see it.
Esport fans are and act different from traditional sport ones (I'm a bit of both hehe, but in esports I look for something different than from trad. ones).
Town/City teams have imo a smaller appeal in esports, banking everything on it, and making it so that it will take time to have a proper "world-wide" league, while in the meantime the rest (except a couple of notable exceptions) rots...
The other huge problem is that a worldwide league just isn't feasible if you want to play a high amount of games. Next season, if there aren't more Asian and European teams, it will be extremely unfair to London, Seoul, and Shanghai to have to fly back and forth across the ocean for every away match (assuming the plan to have arenas in every city actually happens).
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