Even playing overwatch, that they forced faceless fake teams in exclusive segregated league and remotely thought it would succeed was just beyond stupid. Who wants some fictional team merch.
It’s a real travesty that Rick fox got pushed out the way he did. Felt like an owner that actually wanted to be a brand ambassador and everything. Obviously echo fox was a mess, but it felt like he actually cared and wanted to be here.
My cynical take is that it was on purpose. That he wasn't a grifter and they had to get rid of him. Can't have genuine people here! It will mess up what they are trying to do.
You know that Rick fox and his partners sued each other over fraud and echo fox shareholders fired racism lawsuit against him , it wasn’t owl or league it was the internal mess which kissed echo fox . And also under Rick fox , there was the huge sexual assault scandal at Fox News where several announcers were sexual harassed at his company , same thing happened under him at lakers , so it was more of a internal explosion and several major sponsors even nba didn’t want to touch him for a while
Literally so insane. Fantastic reputation, genuine belief in the industry, and gave both credibility and could have opened the door for investments from other nba players
I was at the first OWL finals and the DJ Khaled performance was the second most awkward concert I've ever been and, because his entire act is saying the first two words of his lyrics and then the audience shouts the rest of the lyrics....except that nobody in attendance knew the lyrics. The most awkward concert I've ever been to was Afroman opening for They Might Be Giants at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia.
I think the massive popularity of ERLs in league DOES show that some form of regionalization might be possible. The french don't care that much how many KCROP players are french, they just support the team.
I would disagree the brand is built on French sentiment (francophone world : Belgium, Switzerland, etc.) so long as the majority of the roaster is French speaking no one cares about imports but the day it passes the 50% mark it becomes Vitality and it loses most of the French fanbase because well they don't represent the country anymore and they are seen as a big soulless corporation.
If 2008 taught us anything, it is that the supposed "reputability" of Wall Street corporations is mainly just leverage to commit control fraud. I fail to see how this Morgan Stanley document is anything other than more of the same. On a positive note, Overwatch is what got me into watching esports, which eventually resulted in watching CS:GO instead of Overwatch. Looking back, Overwatch has a lot of deficiencies as an esport, and these days I cheer when Blizzard does badly, but at the same time a part of me wishes things hadn't gone the way that they did. For me as a viewer, one of the worst things about OWL is that the meta changes were so bad, that players who were at the top one year could be completely irrelevant by the next season.
I was there for the great DJ Khalid performance. It was so much worse than even Monte got across. You can't put to words how insanely awkward it was. Ive never felt a crowd of a (mostly) full arena be awkward and cringing all at the same time.
I was also there. It was to the point where no one even knew what was going on. The live audio mix was atrocious and you just had this giant penguin of a man waddling around on stage with the house lights still on and less than a quarter of the arena attempting to pretend they were somewhat into what was happening while everyone else was just legitimately confused as to what was going on. It was just baffling.
Anyone else love it when Richard is ranting and when someone interrupts him, he does the quick lay back into the chair and sips the water bottle? Every time
50:45 this moment right here where the you realize the league has been locked into a format that can never work and cannot change because the folks at the top refuse to tell bobby kotik that the vision of a grand esports league he was spun needs to be tempered. The league was doomed from the moment the people pulling the strings were yesmen who were afraid to face reality, no game or league can possibly succeed when leadership decides to bury their head in the sand. They were either afraid that they had sold bobby a bill of lies and could not face the embarrassment of admitting it or just it was bobbys idea and they were too cowardly to push back on it, either way, when an organization has such absurdly obvious failings at the top level its natural that everything else will get dragged down by it too.
I know nothing about LoL other than playing TFT but I still watch this from time to time cause I appreciate Monte and Harsha for there time in OWL. I’m a OWL fanatic. I won’t for a minute pretend that Owl from the inception. Was never going to be sustainable. I’m all for attacking the execs and the shitty corporate suits behind the scheme. But things like Thorin attacking the player base themselves just for liking the game. We still have a massive fanbase cause no other game in the esports scene has anything like the experience that OW brings. A game that requires such massive team coordination. And gives a team arena shooter like no other out there. The game was GoTY so let’s not pretend that ppl don’t like the game. But I do appreciate all the players and ORGs that even though they were operating at massive losses. They gave us fans 6 years of great Pro Overwatch. It will stay with me the rest of my life. I hope the game finds a way to keep a version of pro overwatch after it ends. Hope it goes back to apex days
I remember being at the first Dallas Fuel homestand in 2019 and during a commercial break they had a little video showing what the plan was for the league in 2020. As I was watching the lines go back and forth between different countries and entire continents, I looked at my friend and said "these poor kids, they are gonna burn out so fast". I wholeheartedly agree that Covid gave the league a few more years of life, because their image would have killed it by 2021 at the latest.
What a tragedy, I truly love/loved the OWL. I really hope OW esports rises from OWL's ashes, would be incredible if Monte could help with that. I've never been able to connect with an esports team/group of players quite like NYXL in Season 1. The local fanbase in New York made the watch parties absolutely insane, it was a really special experience.
About the topic of not revealing player numbers, Blizzard did exactly that with World of Warcraft. While it was on the up n'up, they kept bragging about it. Showing player numbers everywhere. 12 million during it's peak in Wrath of the Lich King. Then the following expansion(Cataclysm) was released, wasn't well received and numbers started dropping. Mists of Pandaria came out, numbers remained kinda the same. Last time they showed supposedly real player numbers was during Warlords of Draenor, the expansion that followed Mists of Pandaria. I believe it was around 6 million at the time, half of it's peak numbers, and they never revealed them ever again. For any of their games! Now they just reveal the Monthly Active User bullshit for the whole Battle net app, which includes all of Activision Blizzard games, and probably only reveal those numbers because of the quarterly reports. They gotta throw sand at their shareholders eyes somehow.
by the way, "users" is a definition that includes bots, even those run by the company. which make no mistake, all major companies use to manipulate their player bases
Monti head shake when throorin drops the logic bomb on the league. He still believes the shit could have worked. He was there for wc3. He should remember what happens when blizzard takes contro of the esporl. It dies. Always And blizzard did not need Activision to fuck their own esport. Tired of hearing it's all Activision fault when blizzard fucked up without them like it's not a big problem.
And as always, the executives avoid all consequences for their massive, failed decisions. This needs to be investigated - what did Kotick know, and what did he NOT TELL INVESTORS AND REGULATORS who were reviewing the MicroSoft acquisition terms. Remember: ActiBlizzion KNEW that PVE had been cancelled, but continued lying to both consumers AND investors for over half a year longer. We all know that Bobby Kotick has no morals, but this behavior may actually be illegal not simply unethical.
It really is sad that i possibly will never be able to see an actual esports game live, living so far away from any possible venue plus the actual cost of traveling really blocks out a huge amount of your target audience. This goes back to plenty of things but the cost of entry is way too high to drive alot of revenue towards the game not to mention actual community interaction
The one thing where i disagree with Lewis, the game is great, sry was. It had major issues from the beginning with spaghetti coding that never got fixed and it was always hard to observe, but the biggest problem the game had was shitty balancing. Also i disagree with Harsha, the game has gotten worse. 2-2-2 was a bad change for the game, so was 1-2-2. It was a band-aid for goats cause blizzard decided not to balance the game. The battlepass in OW is so predatory that i stopped playing the game.
was a big Montecristo fan for LCK, Liked Overwatch when it came out but I thought it quickly became boring to watch, now that it's properly dead, it's only fitting to hear your take on this mess.
Well, Bobby Kotick wanted the OWL to be what he wanted it to be and while people knew it would fail, so long as they got paid they didn't care. But at some point Bobby wanted the OWL to make money for him. That is kinda what people mean when they say "eating your cake and having it too". It is much easier to keep your job if you are not that good at it by agreeing with everything your boss says and bullshiting your way thru it. Until it all comes crashing down that is. People like Richard Lewis were the ones Bobby should want to have in the team to make it work, but the childish mentality of Kotick (to be fair, a lot of the people that have his money ARE very childish) there was no way to make it work.
14:35 I've always thought, since probably 6-months post OW League's launch, that Blizzard spent so much money and resources on this esports project that there was none left to keep the game itself fun and engaging. Hence less interesting seasonal events and glacial balance updates. and the worst part was I didn't even think OWL was interesting to watch. So the game I loved got worse and worse because of an esport project I didn't care about.
They seemed to mistake the interest for ow worlds with interest for eSport league. It's like looking at the 100m dash audience at the Olympics and then deciding to make a league around the sport thinking this would be the average viewership. They had a great product but then turned to investing in marketing instead of the game and letting the eSport grow naturally as it did for so many games.
30:00 - Note about the second CGS combine, despite one team on both continents(Pandemic in NA and fnatic in EU) being clearly better than the entire CGS circuit, and both going undefeated at their respective combines, i think only like 3 player out of all 10 got chosen for the CGS. What a joke.
My biggest issue was I would always rather play tf2 than overwatch. Same way I’d rather play csgo than val. Because of that I never followed the comp scene because I didn’t enjoy the game quite as much as a scene I already followed I dunno if it’s nostalgia but I just prefer the pure mechanical gameplay over the use of abilities
well i think that is what distinguishes good OW characters from bad characters. Good heroes have abilities have abilities that feel like fair and fluid mechanics meanwhile others have cheaty (press a button) abilities. So i get what you mean.
Man Monte really is a used cars salesman " Hey guys let me tell you why your car breaking down every 25 miles is actually a good thing"- Monte(probably)
Yep pure cognitive bias ofc that means milloin things, but that is the simpliest way to put it. Foundamentals of Overwatch league were just wrong. It is nearly impossible to make anything work If foundamentals building blocks are out of place. Montes complaning OWL failure on developers' lack of updating game from goats meta (3 tanks 3 support) to role lock (2 tanks 2 dps 2 support) is just against everything liked about brood war which was developer to make the game and let players and teams to figure out the meta. Foundamentaly Esport is just a marketing tool for the game so developer never wants to charge money form the viewer and future gamer/customer expect 40€ price of the game and in-game purchases. Monte says OWL was meant to be like F1 circuit with home and away games (that is already little out of wack). F1 circuit is very expensive and on site ticket buying viewers are not covering circuit expenses, but broadcast viewing rights are and 12€/month pay for view. OWL was never going to have sustainable broadcasting rights revenue and blizzard would never have put OWL behind pay wall, because then OWL would no longer server them as a marketing tool. Monte just wanted so much out of Riot control which he thought could never get worse 😂 and found himself under blizzard communist tyranny were trust is good, but surveillance is best. Where even thinking differently is a crime. It is as Thoorin implied Monte is this close to say Soviet Union failed only because communism was not done the right way. 😊😅😂
@@nikijoe100 I don't fully disagree with your statement but in the comparaison of owl to F1 the costs need to be factored too like renting a venue is not too bad and the tickets can cover that the only other real cost is flying the teams and casters which compared to F1 is nothing so in the end the plan was feasible for sure and tbh i also think it had more potential than what happened. The lack of update also killed the game that is just a fact because they left it in a bad state of updates, you can't balance a game with the expectation that it isn't good but let the people play it and fix it later when they expose the flaws we never cared to find AND THEN just never update it in the end. Goats came in because of brig a hero no one wanted in the first place but became a safehouse for all the boosted mercies from the 5man rez era to justify their rank by addressing the fact they couldn't play any other hero. The fact is the game was great before yes there were complaints but overall everyone could play what they wanted save for a mercy on each team. Giving up on balancing to introduce enforces roles was the death of ow a game that was design around creating original team compositions and once you could no longer swap between roles during a game people stopped communicating because there was no reason to anymore. As for your claim that developers intervention is not favored that was a thing of the past when games were developed to be finished products and not work in progress. Any game can be optimised and then until someone comes with a revolutionary tactic the games and tournaments are just repeats and lack flavor for the most part. Developers intervention is not bad but there needs to be thought put into them which blizzard didn't they wanted to make new heroes rather than balance the game. The game never had a target, casual players didn't get what they wanted, pro never got it either it was just a mess of ideas and no real concepts which killed the game for everyone. The fact the game became less popular made the eSport less popular as well.
@@jeanjacques9365 you have good points and there fore I would like to point out that there is no live event ticket price that would cover owl, cs go or LoL player salaries. Yes if you could run tournament with 10 laptops and 1 computer, but that is not the case. Venue costs also run up when you have to rent it for whole tournament and not just for a single game.
Saudia Arabia where Mecca actually is now trying to be the new "Mecca of esports" they bought esl and bunch of tournament organizers, and are hosting like a mega tourment for various esports games (including leauge) with like a 60 million dollar prize pool. Anyways it's just like standard sport washing but with esports. The latest summoning insight episode throooin and Monte covered it
I was all in on the first season of Overwatch largely because of Monte and Doa, I have the twitch banner thing, I paid for the season etc. I loved the start... but banning Pepe is when I checked out and stopped watching.
bro Monte drank all the KoolAid, holy shit. Dude seriously thought they could sell out places every week in a different state like the WWE live shows, then Thorin and Richard had to intervene every few seconds to try and bring him back down to reality. Man I hope that Blizzard money was good, because no way you seriously believed all that shit man...c'mon lol
I mean he made the most money he ever made from that gig, I dont get why you are dogging on him. He and Doa was brought on to HELP shape the way the whole thing was done. If the big man (Nate or whoever) is saying yes and then all of a sudden those things dont happen what can you do ? Hindsight is 20/20 man
@@silvafangtv I'm dogging on him for basically beleiving in fiction. he always acts like he's rational and understands the business of esports, then he went on to believe the shit he said throughout this episode, all while Thorin is dying from laughter because of how silly some of the shit is.
@@silvafangtv yes but when ow died he crawled back like a dog to lol. he doesn't know shit now about lol. he isn't even entertaining, sure his casting WAS good. now he adds nothing, the only reason he is in ANY show is because of thorin. think why he left lol in the first place. he got mad because his org got banned. he is such a entitled know-it-all, he trusted that sketchy badawi guy, this guy made one of his former org commit suicide. he never talked how he fucked up and shouldn't have trusted that guy. not a single vein of accountability.
Funniest part is him just continually trying to speak on the points and try and give the reasoning behind some of the moves like they weren’t outright delusional and fictional and still believing they could’ve been “good ideas” like no way in hell that shit ever works even in “E-Sports Prime” which really was just a bunch of people selling their game to investors and making them believe they’d multiply their investment xd
The thing I disagree with Richard is that OW was never targeted for weirdos, but everyone would find a character to like. Widow is blue, Tracer is barely legal, Winston is a monkey, Zarya is a FBB, Reinheart is MBB, Mei is not incredibly fit, etc. OW was a game about creativity, LoL was and still is banning creative players... while OW if the opponent is a better Widowmaker than you, you change and adapt to not be stuck in a losers duel. Then your opponent has to adapt now, that was the CORE of the entire experience. GOATS killed that entire experience and since OW have at least one character that appeals to any one person, there will be porn... and lots of it.
@@CONM0S Ow was fun back when one guy with an idea and 5 people were willing to do it met in a game. Any comp could win and the simple fact that any comp could win if everyone committed to it because 6 players could change roles and try things through the game, find the best dps after 1 round kept ego's in check and made it a hell of a fun mess to be part of. Then they gave up on balancing... then made role queues and the game is left with no flavor, no communication, nothing. OW2 at this point is just a way to keep some level of compartimentalisation between the soulless shit it became and what OW once was : a fun game. Looking forward to a day where they make ow classic with the original heroes (you can throw in ana too if you want) and open queue is the only game mode.
Boomers "larp as the saviors of esports" (Richard Lewis's words not mine) with intermittent winks and nudges towards various unrelated conspiracies that the people on the show have no inside knowledge of. What a bizarre concept for a show.
Having never watched an overwatch league match, the overwatch league has been a great source of joy for me.
Even playing overwatch, that they forced faceless fake teams in exclusive segregated league and remotely thought it would succeed was just beyond stupid. Who wants some fictional team merch.
It’s a real travesty that Rick fox got pushed out the way he did. Felt like an owner that actually wanted to be a brand ambassador and everything. Obviously echo fox was a mess, but it felt like he actually cared and wanted to be here.
Yeah, it's hilarious how hard Riot and OWL chased that clout and then pushed him out
My cynical take is that it was on purpose. That he wasn't a grifter and they had to get rid of him. Can't have genuine people here! It will mess up what they are trying to do.
You know that Rick fox and his partners sued each other over fraud and echo fox shareholders fired racism lawsuit against him , it wasn’t owl or league it was the internal mess which kissed echo fox . And also under Rick fox , there was the huge sexual assault scandal at Fox News where several announcers were sexual harassed at his company , same thing happened under him at lakers , so it was more of a internal explosion and several major sponsors even nba didn’t want to touch him for a while
Literally so insane. Fantastic reputation, genuine belief in the industry, and gave both credibility and could have opened the door for investments from other nba players
@@aakashdabas2370 Do... Do you think Rick Fox ran FOX News?
Sideshow and Bren are to me the best examples of the people who went on to bigger and better things, they are killing it in Valorant now
real they possibly made the best decision for themselves
I would love to see them do some TF2 again
Here it is. Was awaiting for this topic. It had to come eventually.
I was at the first OWL finals and the DJ Khaled performance was the second most awkward concert I've ever been and, because his entire act is saying the first two words of his lyrics and then the audience shouts the rest of the lyrics....except that nobody in attendance knew the lyrics. The most awkward concert I've ever been to was Afroman opening for They Might Be Giants at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia.
I have a lot of respect for Harsha. Hope he lands well after all this.
I think the massive popularity of ERLs in league DOES show that some form of regionalization might be possible. The french don't care that much how many KCROP players are french, they just support the team.
I would disagree the brand is built on French sentiment (francophone world : Belgium, Switzerland, etc.) so long as the majority of the roaster is French speaking no one cares about imports but the day it passes the 50% mark it becomes Vitality and it loses most of the French fanbase because well they don't represent the country anymore and they are seen as a big soulless corporation.
If 2008 taught us anything, it is that the supposed "reputability" of Wall Street corporations is mainly just leverage to commit control fraud. I fail to see how this Morgan Stanley document is anything other than more of the same.
On a positive note, Overwatch is what got me into watching esports, which eventually resulted in watching CS:GO instead of Overwatch. Looking back, Overwatch has a lot of deficiencies as an esport, and these days I cheer when Blizzard does badly, but at the same time a part of me wishes things hadn't gone the way that they did. For me as a viewer, one of the worst things about OWL is that the meta changes were so bad, that players who were at the top one year could be completely irrelevant by the next season.
Same journey as me only I went to watching Rainbow 6 then League, started to get into CS very recently
I was there for the great DJ Khalid performance. It was so much worse than even Monte got across. You can't put to words how insanely awkward it was. Ive never felt a crowd of a (mostly) full arena be awkward and cringing all at the same time.
I was also there. It was to the point where no one even knew what was going on. The live audio mix was atrocious and you just had this giant penguin of a man waddling around on stage with the house lights still on and less than a quarter of the arena attempting to pretend they were somewhat into what was happening while everyone else was just legitimately confused as to what was going on. It was just baffling.
I was there too and almost killed myself the next day in shame and cringe
Watching online, I had the privilege of tabbing out because of the cringe. Must've been painful being stuck in there at the venue.
Oh what I would give to have been there hahahaha
Anyone else love it when Richard is ranting and when someone interrupts him, he does the quick lay back into the chair and sips the water bottle? Every time
50:45 this moment right here where the you realize the league has been locked into a format that can never work and cannot change because the folks at the top refuse to tell bobby kotik that the vision of a grand esports league he was spun needs to be tempered.
The league was doomed from the moment the people pulling the strings were yesmen who were afraid to face reality, no game or league can possibly succeed when leadership decides to bury their head in the sand. They were either afraid that they had sold bobby a bill of lies and could not face the embarrassment of admitting it or just it was bobbys idea and they were too cowardly to push back on it, either way, when an organization has such absurdly obvious failings at the top level its natural that everything else will get dragged down by it too.
That story when some1 from Blizzard called Richard was so fucking hilarious
You know you fucked up when third party porn of your game had the biggest impact on internet culture...
I remember on the flight back from Blizzcon 2018 on the plane turning the tv on and seeing OWL on tv. It was crazy.
I know nothing about LoL other than playing TFT but I still watch this from time to time cause I appreciate Monte and Harsha for there time in OWL. I’m a OWL fanatic. I won’t for a minute pretend that Owl from the inception. Was never going to be sustainable. I’m all for attacking the execs and the shitty corporate suits behind the scheme. But things like Thorin attacking the player base themselves just for liking the game. We still have a massive fanbase cause no other game in the esports scene has anything like the experience that OW brings. A game that requires such massive team coordination. And gives a team arena shooter like no other out there. The game was GoTY so let’s not pretend that ppl don’t like the game. But I do appreciate all the players and ORGs that even though they were operating at massive losses. They gave us fans 6 years of great Pro Overwatch. It will stay with me the rest of my life. I hope the game finds a way to keep a version of pro overwatch after it ends. Hope it goes back to apex days
I remember being at the first Dallas Fuel homestand in 2019 and during a commercial break they had a little video showing what the plan was for the league in 2020. As I was watching the lines go back and forth between different countries and entire continents, I looked at my friend and said "these poor kids, they are gonna burn out so fast". I wholeheartedly agree that Covid gave the league a few more years of life, because their image would have killed it by 2021 at the latest.
fun fact about the genocide of Pepe in the teams discords, Slasher joined every server and supposedly snitched to who still had pepes in the server
That guy is a total fucking tool.
What a tragedy, I truly love/loved the OWL. I really hope OW esports rises from OWL's ashes, would be incredible if Monte could help with that. I've never been able to connect with an esports team/group of players quite like NYXL in Season 1. The local fanbase in New York made the watch parties absolutely insane, it was a really special experience.
Thorin straight out the gate with the dire straits love it
About the topic of not revealing player numbers, Blizzard did exactly that with World of Warcraft. While it was on the up n'up, they kept bragging about it. Showing player numbers everywhere. 12 million during it's peak in Wrath of the Lich King. Then the following expansion(Cataclysm) was released, wasn't well received and numbers started dropping. Mists of Pandaria came out, numbers remained kinda the same. Last time they showed supposedly real player numbers was during Warlords of Draenor, the expansion that followed Mists of Pandaria. I believe it was around 6 million at the time, half of it's peak numbers, and they never revealed them ever again. For any of their games! Now they just reveal the Monthly Active User bullshit for the whole Battle net app, which includes all of Activision Blizzard games, and probably only reveal those numbers because of the quarterly reports. They gotta throw sand at their shareholders eyes somehow.
by the way, "users" is a definition that includes bots, even those run by the company. which make no mistake, all major companies use to manipulate their player bases
6 million sounds a bit high for back then, I heard it was more 400,000.
Richard trying to keep it together at 2:34:17 after the Travis shot killed me.
I couldn't quite tell what the burn was - "gums and a sea friend"?
@@10tothe10088 Gums and an ADC friend
@@N7Null oh thanks, I was like "the fuck does Ariel have to do with this"
Monti head shake when throorin drops the logic bomb on the league. He still believes the shit could have worked. He was there for wc3. He should remember what happens when blizzard takes contro of the esporl. It dies. Always
And blizzard did not need Activision to fuck their own esport. Tired of hearing it's all Activision fault when blizzard fucked up without them like it's not a big problem.
Less than 1 minute in and already a Canada euthanasia joke and a shot across the bow at the anime avatars, lfg 😂
Absolutely fantastic insight from multiple perspectives on this topic, heavily appreciate what you guys do.
I like how the ADL managed to get the Pepe emote timeline incorrect. It was popular on 4chan way before it hit twitch and streaming.
God bless Richard Lewis for knowing Totalbiscuit
Miss him very much
And as always, the executives avoid all consequences for their massive, failed decisions. This needs to be investigated - what did Kotick know, and what did he NOT TELL INVESTORS AND REGULATORS who were reviewing the MicroSoft acquisition terms.
Remember: ActiBlizzion KNEW that PVE had been cancelled, but continued lying to both consumers AND investors for over half a year longer. We all know that Bobby Kotick has no morals, but this behavior may actually be illegal not simply unethical.
has there been discussion about OWL moving from Twitch to YT for S2? For me that's when it all went downhill
Thorin's joke at the beginning was insanely sharp.
It really is sad that i possibly will never be able to see an actual esports game live, living so far away from any possible venue plus the actual cost of traveling really blocks out a huge amount of your target audience. This goes back to plenty of things but the cost of entry is way too high to drive alot of revenue towards the game not to mention actual community interaction
Montecristo's freeze pipe pitch is mint
the parallels to CGS are too funny
The one thing where i disagree with Lewis, the game is great, sry was. It had major issues from the beginning with spaghetti coding that never got fixed and it was always hard to observe, but the biggest problem the game had was shitty balancing.
Also i disagree with Harsha, the game has gotten worse. 2-2-2 was a bad change for the game, so was 1-2-2. It was a band-aid for goats cause blizzard decided not to balance the game. The battlepass in OW is so predatory that i stopped playing the game.
Called this in 2016. Shame it took seven years to come true.
Your take Aged like wine. Ow aged like milk
1:05:52 this is the incredible insight that I came here for, Bravo! 1:12:40 for more laughs
Much anticipated episode
I'm all about Richard's energy for this topic.
was a big Montecristo fan for LCK, Liked Overwatch when it came out but I thought it quickly became boring to watch, now that it's properly dead, it's only fitting to hear your take on this mess.
Wtf Monte is even talking about ? Those viewership numbers for OW basically unsustainable for a game xd
Well, Bobby Kotick wanted the OWL to be what he wanted it to be and while people knew it would fail, so long as they got paid they didn't care.
But at some point Bobby wanted the OWL to make money for him.
That is kinda what people mean when they say "eating your cake and having it too".
It is much easier to keep your job if you are not that good at it by agreeing with everything your boss says and bullshiting your way thru it.
Until it all comes crashing down that is.
People like Richard Lewis were the ones Bobby should want to have in the team to make it work, but the childish mentality of Kotick (to be fair, a lot of the people that have his money ARE very childish) there was no way to make it work.
14:35 I've always thought, since probably 6-months post OW League's launch, that Blizzard spent so much money and resources on this esports project that there was none left to keep the game itself fun and engaging. Hence less interesting seasonal events and glacial balance updates.
and the worst part was I didn't even think OWL was interesting to watch. So the game I loved got worse and worse because of an esport project I didn't care about.
They seemed to mistake the interest for ow worlds with interest for eSport league. It's like looking at the 100m dash audience at the Olympics and then deciding to make a league around the sport thinking this would be the average viewership. They had a great product but then turned to investing in marketing instead of the game and letting the eSport grow naturally as it did for so many games.
My evening just got so much better
30:00 - Note about the second CGS combine, despite one team on both continents(Pandemic in NA and fnatic in EU) being clearly better than the entire CGS circuit, and both going undefeated at their respective combines, i think only like 3 player out of all 10 got chosen for the CGS.
What a joke.
The CGS league seems perfect. Taking you out so you can look like the bad guys is amazing!
More competence on display than you'll ever see in congress.
Thorin forgot Fury but all good.
Great vid as per usual
Let’s be honest, xQc left and so did half the viewerbase lol
My biggest issue was I would always rather play tf2 than overwatch. Same way I’d rather play csgo than val. Because of that I never followed the comp scene because I didn’t enjoy the game quite as much as a scene I already followed
I dunno if it’s nostalgia but I just prefer the pure mechanical gameplay over the use of abilities
I do agree to a large extent. I really enjoyed OW and probably a bit more than TF2, but nothing will ever beat CS FPS wise for me
well i think that is what distinguishes good OW characters from bad characters. Good heroes have abilities have abilities that feel like fair and fluid mechanics meanwhile others have cheaty (press a button) abilities. So i get what you mean.
it's pretty shit that the game creators for overwatch created a ponzi scheme and the team owners were in on it.
Man Monte really is a used cars salesman " Hey guys let me tell you why your car breaking down every 25 miles is actually a good thing"- Monte(probably)
seriously.. I know overwatch is near and dear to him but holy shit its hard to not doubt his integrity after all the shilling this episode.
Yep pure cognitive bias ofc that means milloin things, but that is the simpliest way to put it.
Foundamentals of Overwatch league were just wrong. It is nearly impossible to make anything work If foundamentals building blocks are out of place.
Montes complaning OWL failure on developers' lack of updating game from goats meta (3 tanks 3 support) to role lock (2 tanks 2 dps 2 support) is just against everything liked about brood war which was developer to make the game and let players and teams to figure out the meta.
Foundamentaly Esport is just a marketing tool for the game so developer never wants to charge money form the viewer and future gamer/customer expect 40€ price of the game and in-game purchases.
Monte says OWL was meant to be like F1 circuit with home and away games (that is already little out of wack). F1 circuit is very expensive and on site ticket buying viewers are not covering circuit expenses, but broadcast viewing rights are and 12€/month pay for view.
OWL was never going to have sustainable broadcasting rights revenue and blizzard would never have put OWL behind pay wall, because then OWL would no longer server them as a marketing tool.
Monte just wanted so much out of Riot control which he thought could never get worse 😂 and found himself under blizzard communist tyranny were trust is good, but surveillance is best. Where even thinking differently is a crime.
It is as Thoorin implied Monte is this close to say Soviet Union failed only because communism was not done the right way. 😊😅😂
I mean Monte did help build the car
@@nikijoe100 I don't fully disagree with your statement but in the comparaison of owl to F1 the costs need to be factored too like renting a venue is not too bad and the tickets can cover that the only other real cost is flying the teams and casters which compared to F1 is nothing so in the end the plan was feasible for sure and tbh i also think it had more potential than what happened.
The lack of update also killed the game that is just a fact because they left it in a bad state of updates, you can't balance a game with the expectation that it isn't good but let the people play it and fix it later when they expose the flaws we never cared to find AND THEN just never update it in the end. Goats came in because of brig a hero no one wanted in the first place but became a safehouse for all the boosted mercies from the 5man rez era to justify their rank by addressing the fact they couldn't play any other hero. The fact is the game was great before yes there were complaints but overall everyone could play what they wanted save for a mercy on each team. Giving up on balancing to introduce enforces roles was the death of ow a game that was design around creating original team compositions and once you could no longer swap between roles during a game people stopped communicating because there was no reason to anymore.
As for your claim that developers intervention is not favored that was a thing of the past when games were developed to be finished products and not work in progress. Any game can be optimised and then until someone comes with a revolutionary tactic the games and tournaments are just repeats and lack flavor for the most part. Developers intervention is not bad but there needs to be thought put into them which blizzard didn't they wanted to make new heroes rather than balance the game. The game never had a target, casual players didn't get what they wanted, pro never got it either it was just a mess of ideas and no real concepts which killed the game for everyone.
The fact the game became less popular made the eSport less popular as well.
@@jeanjacques9365 you have good points and there fore I would like to point out that there is no live event ticket price that would cover owl, cs go or LoL player salaries.
Yes if you could run tournament with 10 laptops and 1 computer, but that is not the case. Venue costs also run up when you have to rent it for whole tournament and not just for a single game.
Great episode, very funny.
41:20 If i could go back in time I would stop CS:Source to be marketed as an eSport the way it was. That's the earliest super shit that was done.
Banger
Man, it really was worth 100s of millions of other peoples money, just for this stream to exist.
Spicy. Good riddance what's left of Blizzard.
oh man 1 minute in already laughing :p this outta be good
excellent show, as always
God I miss TB.
1:49:15 What is the Mecca joke ?
Saudia Arabia where Mecca actually is now trying to be the new "Mecca of esports" they bought esl and bunch of tournament organizers, and are hosting like a mega tourment for various esports games (including leauge) with like a 60 million dollar prize pool. Anyways it's just like standard sport washing but with esports. The latest summoning insight episode throooin and Monte covered it
Monte has to eat crow
"Overwatch me!"
It felt like monte was the guest this episode and three wise men talking to their nephew
Finally watching this and hearing Monte desperately try not burn any bridges with Activision is beyond cringe.
Great episode, RL went in lol
I was all in on the first season of Overwatch largely because of Monte and Doa, I have the twitch banner thing, I paid for the season etc. I loved the start... but banning Pepe is when I checked out and stopped watching.
Let him cook!!!
The Pride thing is exclusively a NA thing dripping over to Europa most of Europa also dont want to hear it but get push it on to them
bro Monte drank all the KoolAid, holy shit. Dude seriously thought they could sell out places every week in a different state like the WWE live shows, then Thorin and Richard had to intervene every few seconds to try and bring him back down to reality. Man I hope that Blizzard money was good, because no way you seriously believed all that shit man...c'mon lol
I mean he made the most money he ever made from that gig, I dont get why you are dogging on him. He and Doa was brought on to HELP shape the way the whole thing was done. If the big man (Nate or whoever) is saying yes and then all of a sudden those things dont happen what can you do ? Hindsight is 20/20 man
@@silvafangtv I'm dogging on him for basically beleiving in fiction. he always acts like he's rational and understands the business of esports, then he went on to believe the shit he said throughout this episode, all while Thorin is dying from laughter because of how silly some of the shit is.
@@silvafangtv He has been clearly delusional about it that's why
@@silvafangtv yes but when ow died he crawled back like a dog to lol. he doesn't know shit now about lol. he isn't even entertaining, sure his casting WAS good. now he adds nothing, the only reason he is in ANY show is because of thorin. think why he left lol in the first place. he got mad because his org got banned. he is such a entitled know-it-all, he trusted that sketchy badawi guy, this guy made one of his former org commit suicide. he never talked how he fucked up and shouldn't have trusted that guy. not a single vein of accountability.
Funniest part is him just continually trying to speak on the points and try and give the reasoning behind some of the moves like they weren’t outright delusional and fictional and still believing they could’ve been “good ideas” like no way in hell that shit ever works even in “E-Sports Prime” which really was just a bunch of people selling their game to investors and making them believe they’d multiply their investment xd
The thing I disagree with Richard is that OW was never targeted for weirdos, but everyone would find a character to like.
Widow is blue, Tracer is barely legal, Winston is a monkey, Zarya is a FBB, Reinheart is MBB, Mei is not incredibly fit, etc.
OW was a game about creativity, LoL was and still is banning creative players... while OW if the opponent is a better Widowmaker than you, you change and adapt to not be stuck in a losers duel. Then your opponent has to adapt now, that was the CORE of the entire experience.
GOATS killed that entire experience and since OW have at least one character that appeals to any one person, there will be porn... and lots of it.
The first two sentences are just 💀
Overwatch is just not a fun game to play. The Charakter design and lore cant save that
Overwatch is only good when you can get a team together. Unfortunately it’s nearly impossible to convince 4 of your friends to play this trash heap.
@@CONM0S Ow was fun back when one guy with an idea and 5 people were willing to do it met in a game. Any comp could win and the simple fact that any comp could win if everyone committed to it because 6 players could change roles and try things through the game, find the best dps after 1 round kept ego's in check and made it a hell of a fun mess to be part of. Then they gave up on balancing... then made role queues and the game is left with no flavor, no communication, nothing. OW2 at this point is just a way to keep some level of compartimentalisation between the soulless shit it became and what OW once was : a fun game.
Looking forward to a day where they make ow classic with the original heroes (you can throw in ana too if you want) and open queue is the only game mode.
RIPA HASTRO
B A S E C A S E
21:09
👍
Overwatch league sucks
Hey hey. There's nothing wrong with people enjoying their porn. Let them be happy. No need to kink-shame.
or you could just go outside and not brainwash yourself
Boomers "larp as the saviors of esports" (Richard Lewis's words not mine) with intermittent winks and nudges towards various unrelated conspiracies that the people on the show have no inside knowledge of. What a bizarre concept for a show.
> Describes a made-up concept that the show doesn't conform to
> Describes the imaginary concept as bizarre
2:34:00