It's been a while since I last wrote about e-sports that I wanted to share my feelings on it. There have been many positive (as well as negative) developments in the e-sports world that it is interesting to talk about. I wanted to write about e-sports again because I just came back from BlizzCon, which had a fairly big focus on the competitive aspect of video games. Most of the focus was on Overwatch, which is probably going to become one of the biggest e-sport games out there. Overwatch had a "World Cup" format at BlizzCon, where players from different countries faced off against each other. Pretty soon the Overwatch League is going to happen, which consists of teams in various cities around the world facing against each other. Whether or not Overwatch League is going to be successful is yet to be determined but there is many signs that it might be successful.
First of all, each city in the Overwatch League will have an arena where the games are played. I think for the first season, most of it will be played in the Los Angeles arena but I don't know for sure. The arena aspect is pretty important to e-sports in general since many people would like to attend a live competitive video game match. I know that for the Overwatch World Cup at BlizzCon, the arena was one of the things that made e-sports so important. Attending an arena is really just like watching e-sports on a screen because at an arena, there is a huge jumbotron where all the action is televised. Watching the video game players isn't very interesting at all since all the action is based around the game. Sure there could be some focus on the players (like how are they feeling or are they having a good/bad time) but most of focus will be on the big screen. Although the players are not the focus, it is important that they are there in the arena playing and not just playing somewhere else where no one can see them. Another aspect that I like about e-sports is you get the color commentary along with the visual part of the game. This is super important because most fans wouldn't know what is going on if there was no commentary when the video game is being played. This is very different to other sports in general since you never get commentary while attending a sporting event.
While I think that Overwatch League is going to be successful, there are other concerns that show that it might not be so successful. One of the biggest fears for e-sports is that you never know when the video game will become (or stay) popular or not. It might be great that 20 million people are playing your game right now but after 5 years, maybe there isn't any interest in the game at all. This really depends on the video game company itself, whether they will continue to develop their game or not. One concern is that there is already talk about Overwatch 2, which could vastly change the way Overwatch League is managed. If there is a new Overwatch game, this could be catastrophic to the new Overwatch League. I think it will be interesting to watch and see how the Overwatch League and how much success it will have in the next few years. I think other video game companies are also going to be taking notes and whether or not their own game could become as successful as the Overwatch League. Although I think the Overwatch League will be successful in the short term, I don't see just one game becoming a great success in the long term. Video games are constantly changing so I don't think something like the Overwatch League will be around 40 to 50 years from now. E-sports in general will be around for a long time even though the video games that we will be playing will constantly changing over time.
