If you thought Blizzard’s ask for its Overwatch League was absurdly high for your typical pro e-sports team sponsors, rest assured that they weren’t the target market. Blizzard is after far bigger fish, and it’s getting them too.
ESPN reports that Blizzard now has half a dozen agreements from big-name venture capitalists to host teams in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Shanghai, and Seoul. The US spots are reportedly going for $20 million a pop (as planned) to luminaries including New England Patriots parent company Kraft Sports Group, New York Mets operational organization Sterling Equities, Sacramento Kings co-owner-launched NRG Esports, and Memphis Grizzlies co-owner-funded Immortals. You see the pattern here, I’m sure.
Meanwhile, Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan has posted a really long letter to Overwatch players on the official forums addressing community feedback, balance, and why regular players should stop judging the game based on the pro player meta.
“The most controversial thing I’ll say here (hopefully) is that I believe the game is currently balanced. What I mean is that I don’t feel like there are any heroes who are way too strong to the point of breaking balance. That doesn’t mean that I personally don’t think there are some problems with heroes. […] But I think the game is balanced. Statistically, the things that are most unbalanced aren’t what you think they are. Symmetra and Torbjorn win rates are not balanced. They are too good. But this is why we don’t balance on statistics alone. I don’t sense a great community uproar over the fact that Torb and Symmetra are ‘overpowered’ right now (at least, statistically). As I said last week, the perception of balance is more powerful than balance itself.”
So stop freaking out over the meta, he recommends, because it’s not like it stays the same for long: “We are going to make balance changes to heroes when they need it – and we do this more frequently than you give us credit for. 3 months from now there will be a new meta. If you’re the type of person who feels like the meta should shift every 2 weeks, then you’ll probably be sick of that meta and wishing it was back in the good ol’ dive comp days… I just caution against wanting change for the sake of change. The meta will shift soon enough.”
