Ex-OWL GM reveals Overwatch League’s “breaking point”
BlizzardThe Overwatch League was another casualty of the esports winter and one of the league’s top GM’s has revealed what its breaking points were.
The Overwatch League has been defunct for about three months and is set to be replaced by the Overwatch Champions Series soon. The franchised league had a slow death throughout 2023 as the league played out its final season with an imminent vote to dissolve the competition set for after the Grand Finals.
Enough teams ultimately chose to take a $6 million buyout from Activision Blizzard and exit one of the most high-profile esports leagues to ever come together.
The league’s demise has been blamed on a lot of things, including the ongoing esports winter that has seen multiple companies reduce spending or disappear completely. One former OWL General Manager, who was in charge of the team that won the league in its final season, has pointed toward what he believes the league failed.
The Overwatch League and its demise
Albert ‘yeHHH’ Yeh was the GM of the Florida Mayhem and also a former pro player. He was let go from Misfits, who owned the Mayhem’s OWL spot, shortly after the league dissolved.
In an interview with GGRecon’s Sascha ‘Yiska’ Heinisch, yeHHH explained some of the breaking points for the league, including its lack of Western personalities and the collapse of its primary business model.
“I think it sucks, from a meme standpoint, that our league was so dominated by Koreans that didn’t speak English very well,” he said.
The GM explained that the league became dominated by South Korean players to the extent that every team needed at least a few to be competitive. While these players might have been engaging, and involved in memes from Korea, they were not that compelling to Western fans.
Additionally, yeHHH said that the league’s primary business model was eventually abandoned thanks to the world health crisis.
“The premise that the Overwatch League was built on failed. It was a city-based model with homestands… once homestands failed and nobody wanted to do homestands anymore… The original model was so far away from what was actually going to be viable so yeah it was a failure,” he said.
The former GM also said that he knew it was going to be the last year for the league once he learned that there was going to be a vote from the owners as they have been trying to recoup their money from Activision Blizzard for years up to that point.