Overwatch is the newest and most recent flagship for the notorious gaming company, Blizzard Entertainment, which was extremely popular for making games such as, World Of Warcraft, Heroes Of The Storm, Hearthstone, Diablo 3, Starcraft and it's successor Starcraft 2.
Overwatch was launched as an open beta in 2016, which attracted a ton of players, as much as 10 million of them. Overwatch was created to be a strategic first-person shooter with a variety of characters (heroes) to play with, these characters divided into different classes with special abilities and different playstyle.
With all that being said, let's talk about the eSports aspect of this game and the professional level of it. There has been many events, tournaments and cups ever since the popularization of the game but only recently the biggest of them all was launched, the Overwatch League.
The Overwatch League is a huge tournament set by Blizzard along with Overwatch Contenders being right below it as the a tier 2 tournament. Both being sponsored by companies such as HP and Intel and other investors that sponsor teams individually.
What’s so interesting about Overwatch is the amount of thought, practice, coordination, teamwork, communication and so many other skills that should be mastered to be played at a professional level. Those players have played this game for countless hours, as much as 10,000+ hours of practice, studying the game, getting a sense of it and mastering every mechanic they can to get to where they are in terms of talent and skill.
And that resulted in so many great, talented players to shine and make a living off their passion for the game and their skills in it. Originally, the salaries promised to the players was at least $50,000 but later on it was revealed by a Korean website that the average salary was anything between $80,000 and $120,000 for each player, which is subject to increase thanks to the bonuses and the prizes gained when the team wins a stage. The prize pool for every stage being $125,000. The biggest prize pool of a tournament was the Overwatch Open tournament which was played in Atlanta, United States, which consisted of a grand total of $300,000 in prizes.
Just to put things into perspective about the size of the Overwatch League, which wasn’t launched too long ago, Twitch has made a deal with Blizzard to be the only sole third-party broadcaster for the Overwatch League in the entire world except for China, these streams are provided in English, Korean and French.
By February 2018, after the conclusion of the first Stage of the inaugural season, ESPN reported that the revenue projections for the League has skyrocketed and exceeded all its expectations, with some insiders claiming that the League's revenue was four times more than it was initially planned; this was in part through its Twitch streaming deal and new advertisers like Toyota and T-Mobile that came on board a few weeks into the League play.
And that was just the Overwatch league, there are still many teams rising through Overwatch contenders and smaller tournaments who don’t go unnoticed and at this rate of growth, soon, it’s going to go worldwide and more teams from all over the world would be joining the competition in pursuit of 1 goal, being the best team in the world.