Going Rogue? Going Home…

If you’re into Overwatch these two tweets are super important.

They show how little transparency there is in the world around the OWL franchise, and how little people are willing to share about it.

Yet, these tweets are a mirror into the OWL scene: It shows the struggle that organizations that don’t understand how some aspects of esports work have to go through. The ultimate punishment for this behaviour is known to those who have been reading and following esports: shutdown, blame-game and general disappointment.

Who is Rogue?

Rogue has been one of the most successful orgs in the Overwatch scene this year, the Overwatch team racked up six first-place titles in 2017 then fell off the contenders league after coming in 5th. Not the end of the world, look at NRG…

Networking is important, Rogue is based in Las Vegas and has amongst others Steve Aoki in its leadership team. For those who don’t know who Steve is, he’s a really popular DJ/producer — a guy that can definitely open doors to anyone, because of his fame and pool of connections!

Going …Rogue?

Turns out that Rogue was not able to secure a spot for OWL — that sounds like a HUGE mismanagement error.
There are no public details as to what happened; everything is handled behind closed doors: Rogue says they had the money but still did not get approved to become an active participant in the OWL.

Now tell me which money hungry business would say no to $20M unless something really fishy happened during the approval process/ due diligence to become part of the franchise. This is something that I would like to underline. The tweets are blaming the lack of transparency into the OWL yet at the same time provide none. WTF?

Business is not just having a great team who can perform online/offline under stress. Business is not just tweeting out animated GIFs on twitter hoping for fans to buy some of your merch. Business, in Overwatch, is about getting into the OWL franchise.

No matter how good Rogue’s player are, the organization has failed their team — the Overwatch one — in not being able to capitalize their #1 most important business goal of the year.

Let’s read these two tweets again…

To us, these OWL recruiters that have been blamed for not having accepted Rogue into the franchise, are ninjas (pun intended) that operate in the dark. There is no transparency because Blizzard-Activision owns the franchise and they don’t have to be transparent. Sure it would be nice, but they don’t HAVE to.

Bursting out on social media that your team has not been accepted into the season 1 of the OWL without providing context does your organization no good whatsoever.
You are literally pouring gasoline on a fire that you can’t keep under control. Sure your fans are going to get pissed at the OWL but what good have you done? You haven’t improved neither yours or anyone’s position.

Everyone knows that in the world of esports you have to network with people, it’s still a small niche of people up there, at the top of the Overwatch mountain Olympus that run things.

Those who are lucky enough to be at the top are people who run the leagues and the biggest teams: they all know each other, it would be so naive to not admit it.
If you can’t play this game by its rules, you won’t be able to play the game at all.

Again, Rogue failed their business goal #1 in Overwatch.

• Without other public knowledge it looks like they failed to network their way into OWL
• They disbanded their team, leaving all the players to hang on the side of the street. Now that they’re not in OWL they probably won’t have the salaries they were promised.
• They took their drama to Twitter — that’s pretty much like marketing and brand harakiri.

What’s next?

The news that Rogue has left the building has clearly made some points resonate and stand out:

Blizzard-Activision is keeping those franchise spots under tight lock.

If the OWL becomes successful (as it is planned to be), everyone will benefit from it as they are currently pioneers of the esports franchise league, they will be able to set a standard and the foundations of what future esports leagues will look and feel like.

Right now what we’re lacking it seems, is a little bit of transparency — the whole OWL concept has been evolving in the shadows and the communication has been rather scarce to us viewers. All we know, as external members of the audience, is that things are moving in some direction.

More transparency will come with seasons 2 and 3 when things really start to pay off — and then we will probably find out why Rogue went home with an “F”