Quote:
Originally Posted by philly_account12
There are actually a ton of reasons for that.
To start, Overwatch League's main goal of home games in each team's city never got a chance to materialize. In 2019, they started with 3 homestands (basically mini in season tournaments in Dallas/LA/Atlanta hosted by the home teams). They used that to expand into the full season being hosted in home team cities. Unfortunately, that season started in February 2020 so the in person events got cancelled pretty quickly for obvious reasons. This year they're just starting to do some in person events again but its closer to the homestead format and not an actual traveling league. There are also a ton of teams in the league in Europe and Asia so logistics are a nightmare I'm sure.
The other reasons all have to do with Blizzard (the company that made Overwatch). Blizzard has had some really bad press over the couple years for being a terrible company (mainly due to laying off ~10% of their employees in 2019 and coming out on the wrong side of the Hong Kong-China situation among other things). Additionally, they've been working on Overwatch 2 for a while now and while its sort of a sequel its also basically a big addition to the base game. In preparation for that they've been doing the minimum amount of maintenance on the original game. On top of all of that the game director and "face" of the development team since the game was created left the company in April.
Yeah N3rd Street Gaming/Nerd Street Gaming is the same company. Its a startup created by Drexel students in NoLibs (on N 3rd Street) that is building what are essentially local e-sports community centers. The idea being that they're spaces to host local tournaments and other events while also providing access to people who lack equipment/internet connections to be able to rent gaming equipment by the hour.
They're the ones applying for the permit further up the thread to build a big esports campus at 401 N. Broad. |
Holy shit, this is pretty exciting I didn't know Philly has this level of tech & gaming in the city, that N3RD HQ is beautiful. good stuff their doing as well basically bringing back arcade rooms in new form.
Also that sucks for Overwatch they basically got kicked when they were coming up the pandemic defiantly messed them up. Hopefully they can make a comeback with things starting back up & the new overwatch game in the works. plus the flooding and issues over in that part of the world defiantly isn't helping.
I can see it working out thought it has good backing just happened at a bad time.