Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally don't think Blizzard has any idea what they're doing in the esports scene. They destroyed SC2 and fumbled HotS, I don't think Overwatch will be any different. I was at Blizzcon last weekend and even though everyone there seemed excited about Overwatch, the numbers just weren't there. Barely breaking 300k viewers for a world championship (when DOTA, LoL, CSGO all break 1M+) -- the state of the game is not…
OWL definitely has a weird, heavy-handed feel to it -- it's almost as though Blizzard is trying to forcibly create a competitive 'scene' that emulates a traditional sports league, rather than allowing the scene to evolve naturally as it has in other games. By far the weirdest part of OWL for me has been Blizzard's insistence on having teams represent cities -- up to the point of renaming existing teams to fit their n…
Bingo. Which is why so many competitive gamers are simply not interested in it. The way esports has generally grown is "bottom-up" -- local competitions spring up first and then larger, more well-funded tournaments take place. Blizzard is going for the "top-down" approach. We'll see what happens.