Event Recap: Overwatch League Grand Finals
We witnessed in person the highly engaging spectacle of the leading esports tournament
After four stages of competition, each lasting for five weeks, the inaugural season of the Overwatch League culminated this past weekend at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The two-day Grand Finals event featured a tense battle of two underdog teams, with the London Spitfire emerging victorious over the Philadelphia Fusion and taking home the $1 million prize.
Fans flooded Brooklyn wearing jerseys from all twelve Overwatch League teams while others came dressed in cosplay as their favorite game heroes. Crowds formed to take photos with professional players like Diya from the Shanghai Dragons, Rawkus from the Houston Outlaws, and the entire New York Excelsior team. If you still don’t consider esports a legitimate part of the cultural zeitgeist today, you certainly will once you attend one of these tournaments in person and witness the enthusiastic crowd go wild over their gaming stars.
Fan Engagement
What first stood out to us was just how impressively high-production-value the entire event was. There was very little that the Overwatch League Grand Finals did not have. According to SportsBusiness Daily, the Overwatch League used the NBA All-Star Weekend experience as inspiration for producing the two-day finals. The result, as anyone walked into Barclays Center over the two nights can attest, is a highly entertaining and engaging event that truly brought the fans together to celebrate what they love, with never a dull moment to spare.
Unlike conventional sports events where being able to see the players is crucial to the enjoyment of the spectators, players from the two final teams were stationed on opposite sides of the stage and hidden from view behind computer monitors. Instead, all the action took place on the enormous LED screens above the players, where state-of-the-art screens lit up the stadium with the game’s colorful heroes and maps, displaying player statistics, objective percentages, and montages between breaks.
Along with non-stop action and spectacular plays, there was a live DJ spinning music to keep excitement levels high, live commentary that highlighted performances and kept casual fans informed, and celebrity appearances from DJ Khaled and Blizzard’s Overwatch Game Director Jeff Kaplan, a legend among Overwatch fans.
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Brand Takeaways
The Overwatch League Grand Finals was an unequivocal success. The two-day event drew an announced 22,434 total fans over Friday and Saturday. For comparison, the Grand Finals two-day average is not far behind the single-game average the New York Islanders (12,004) brought to the Barclays Center.
The Overwatch League is a long-term project and the inaugural season has been a learning experience for Blizzard on figuring out how to standardize an esports league with city-based teams, making esports profitable for owners and teams, as well as keeping fans engaged throughout a season. Given the overall success of year one, brands need to keep an eye on how the Overwatch League plans to get local markets more involved as it expands. This is especially important in the U.S., given that most teams consist of international players that have no tangible connection to the city they represent.
Moreover, with the recently announced multi-year partnership with Disney to broadcast matches on ESPN, Disney XD and ABC family of networks, the Overwatch League will likely dedicate resources to broadening their audience reach by focusing on making the game easier to understand for casual fans. This would no doubt, in turn, make the league more attractive to brand sponsors. All things considered, fans and players will likely see a very different Overwatch League and Grand Finals next year, as the league plans to add six expansion teams both domestic and international for season two. And you bet the Lab will keep a close eye on the esports space as it continues to grow and mature.
