With Stage Two of Season One of Overwatch League now underway, the league is now preparing to shift gears toward its post-launch plans, which include continuing to fine-tune and improve the experience for viewers, mulling expansion and bringing in more sponsors. Cynopsis Esports sat down with Overwatch League Commissioner Nate Nanzer to discuss the success of season one, expansion rumors and more.
Nanzer on season one: The goal for season one was a successful launch, operationally and from a product perspective. It has been encouraging that most of the press so far has said that what we have produced so far has been high quality. So that’s a pretty good barometer for us to measure ourselves by, so we know that people like the product. Now, it is about learning fast and continuing to iterate and make it better and there will be a ton of incremental things like that we’ll add over the course of the season. Now it is really about fine-tuning the product and working hard toward the eventual goal, which is – for example – Seoul and LA are playing and they are either in Seoul or LA. When we are not hosting matches this season, the thing that has occupied our minds has been getting our teams ready to host their own matches.
On how the viewing experience will evolve: We feel like watching Overwatch has come a long way over the past year. It was hard to watch when it first came out and there weren’t too many spectator tools. As we look forward, we want to do things like figure out how to set up camera angles where on Point B on Anubis, for example, we always use the same top-down camera views. So you start to build those sub-conscious cues with the viewer of “this is what it looks like when we watch this map.” Those are the types of changes we are going to work on, as well as being thoughtful about when we switch heroes, when do we go third-person/first-person, etc.
On developing talent: We are really lucky to have the roster we have. Now we’ve got Malik and Goldenboy as two great additions as well. We really view Contenders as a proving ground for new talent. We want to get to the point where we have dozens and dozens of quality casters and analysts and hosts. We are super fortunate to have Chris Puckett, as I don’t think people realize how difficult the role of host can be. He is a pro and that job is really hard. We really want to groom our analysts and give them more tools like telestration.
On increasing diversity: We got a bunch of flack for the diversity of the talent pool, but what people didn’t realize is that we couldn’t get some deals done in time. Diversity and being good are important in everything we do and there are names that are out there that are small names in the community now who may not have a lot of followers now, but we hope that we can start to give opportunities to folks like that to get involved in Contenders and eventually move to the big stage with Overwatch League.
On the Twitch partnership: Twitch is a great partner. We really wanted to not just have somebody give us money and distribute content, because we can distribute content. Instead, we wanted somebody who wanted to build something with us. The team at Twitch was super excited about the opportunity to create something special together. Our announcements (re: Cheering/League Tokens) with them is the start of that and there will be other stuff you will hear about soon.
On reports of expansion: None of those reports are accurate because we haven’t talked to anybody about expansion yet. I think we will be in the market soon and there are a lot of people who are interested. Frankly, we needed time to update our materials as last year we were selling a conceptual product and now we have something that is successful. I expect that we will be in the market soon and the focus, honestly, will be on expanding the market internationally in Europe and Asia.
