He was tired of not cashing in the Overwatch pennies tournaments that run all the time and wanted to try for the "big one" coming up soon, I think.
Someone also hinted that he's team made him forget about Quakecon and focus on OW.
I sure hope he's salary is decent enough to keep him afloat, same goes for the majority of other current OW players.
Don't know about his salary specifically but I wouldn't worry about OW salaries in general. Big teams/brands have been picking up rosters left and right and Reynad (the Tempo Storm owner and former HS player) commented a while ago that no other esports title has reached the kind of salaries Overwatch has this early on.
Unfortunately it's not nearly as entertaining to me as watching a good Quake duel... If some of the Quake heroes are successful in it I may watch just to see them play but I put my hopes on Diabotical and QC...
It could also be true that he probably got burned out and tired of QL recently (no connection with OW crap), finishing only 6th back in QuakeCon 2015 — quite a drop from the gold he got the previous year.
(Ir)regardless thereof, it was indeed sad not seeing him (and Anton) this time on the stage of what might have possibly been the last major Quake event as we know it.
for a professional player there are bigger incentives in other games, hell I even dare to say that there's bigger competition in other titles just because of the amount of potential winners is simply higher
there are not many people successful in transitioning to another gametype, i.e. from duel to a team-based shooter with completely different gameplay ... I dont know anyone who transitionend successfully from quake to counterstrike (or vice versa) or from quake to overwatch ...
it's all about practice and having hours with your team mates tbh... quake has gave him a shitton of skills and now he has to learn the game when he already has covered most basics.. he's p good in OW imo
I don't see overwatch keeping that pace in esports such as CSGO and LoL. It's boring af to watch. It's fun to play and teamup with friends and all sure but the meta is dull as fuck and it's a clusterfuck to spectate.
In the long run I'm actually curious how far OW can go. Right now the only interest people have to watching it is the fact there's huge money involved and huge interest from sponsors to give money to players for exposure.
Problem is, the same goes for any esport title, there's only going to be at BEST 15 to 20 teams that get decent exposure so the salary will slowly come down to only a handful of players. Simultanenously, the game beeing a very bad watching experience, the viewers will also go down even if they'll still make quakecon's 5k average figure look cute in comparison.
The hype is real atm and the viewers numbers aren't even close to a CSGO Major or a LoL LCS stream.
Both CSGO and (especially) LoL are impossibly boring for me to watch, even more than Overwatch. When you have tens of millions of players they're going to tune in just like they do with LoL.
I'd say how far OW will go is almost solely determined by whether it's popularity is of the lasting sort. Too early to tell but ppl will watch anything they have an active interest because they're playing it I think.
The tournaments are still so early that I think you can't say much from the current viewership numbers. I don't think there's even been any really big one yet although some upcoming ones are at the online qualifier stage.
Lol and csgo are infinitely more spec friendly. You can actually see what's happening on the stream even if you don't play the game. Sure you won't know what every spell in lol does exactly, but you'll get the general idea. In ow Ita fucking hard to grasp anything because of visual clutter and first person POV. And if you get top down view in ow then you can't appreciate the individual player skill.
I won't go into how fun the game is to play, cos I'm really not qualified to judge it (never played it), but for spectating its one of the worst games I've seen
I disagree about LoL in that respect. Overwatch is still a shooter so you can always at least appreciate good shooting. If you don't know the abilities in LoL engagements just look like an effect fest, the screen filling with effect spam. Nothing about it is skillful, clear or exciting at all to an outside observer. It just looks like a big mess of fireworks.
CSGO is probably boring to me only because I don't really care about how slow it is and the type of game it is in general. It does share the problem of first person observing with OW. I don't thing that's even so much of an issue though.
As for visual clutter, I think more than anything the problem I've seen has been that streaming it requires a pretty high standard of quality and many streams have not had that so it has become a pixel mess.
Well lets hope qc will be fun enough to attract the large Overwatch type crowd and also have a duel mode that can provide the type of games we just saw Evil and Rapha play.
To be fair to OW though, any team esport that I've seen is hard to follow. Maybe in OW, they should just stick with one team's perspective at a time or something since there is no flag or tdm mode...
Nothing I've ever seen compares to a good tense match of QL/Q3 duels though. The esport community is missing out :(
Considering Overwatch came out recently
If you compare first quarter numbers viewership/players
to both CSGO/LoL/DotA Overwatch is doing much better than all those considering both MOBA's are F2P and CS is 10 euro one time purchase.
Consider that Overwatch is 40$ dollars and then you realize Overwatch is doing better than any of those games in after they were released.
On top of that Overwatch broke 10 million players mark much quicker
and those numbers are much more realistic than lets say DotA's millions because not everyone can purchase 3-4 times a 40$ dollar game.
This is right but isn't the fact that the game is so succesful in terms of playerbase/casual crowd and the viewership beeing still so low quite bad then ?
The game is doing better in terms of how many people bought it and play it - maybe. But my points remain : the game is horrible to watch and the current viewers numbers aren't all that great (eventhough as said before will need to wait for a big lan).
What esports need is a game where people that don't play the game can still enjoy watching it. OW may attract a very inflated number on the first couple of tries at very big events but as time goes by, the game isn't even fun to watch when you're a player yourself so how can you expect non-players to even bother ? Yeah, out of sheer curiosity on the first few tries as I said above - maybe -, but das it.
If you were going to push an esport title to a large public audience - say on TV, Eurosport, ESPN, whatever... The only game I see have even a remotely chance at sticking up would be CSGO at the moment. And maybe, just maybeee LoL for other reasons... But OW ? Imagine OW on TV. God the awfulness.
who cares about viewership with blizzard making incredible profits out of purchases alone?
they can easily sponsor their tournaments and run them at blizzcon
as a matter of fact the upcoming world cup at blizzcon
I'm in the final 20 people of Bulgaria. If we then qualify through online quali blizzard pays us accomodation/travel/meals/monetary compensation + public speaking thing and shit like that.
Valve doesn't do that for CS players, only for DotA.
EDIT:Look I don't particularly like the game as I have 50 hours in it
It has it's flaws and obvious cons at the moment however it is successful a lot of Quake players and CS players are hating on it
but is the hate justified that's my whole point.
I don't even know why you bring up the hate thing. I don't hate overwatch. I'm only saying that OW is terrible to watch, I'd like you to keep the subject at that. Is all :).
(gosugamers) weekly cups are already peeking at 40k - the same peek numbers during nipgamingtv/roomonfire days 2 years after csgo release.
there's a larger audience in the US atm, because US teams are backed up by bigger orgs and get more exposure in the media with "celebrity" streamers (surefour/seagull/taimou) boosting the popularity.
at this pace, the cologne "major" coming up in a few days will only double the viewership after it's done
if anything has stagnated, it's csgo since the release of overwatch
CSGO isn't the best thing to compare to because it really started so poorly that many people thought the whole game was DOA. Very few titles manage that kind of a resurgence ages after release and certainly Overwatch's story is very different with the hugely successful launch.
I don't think you can say that Overwatch is stagnating at this point either though. If we're looking at just overall numbers for the category on twitch, the early numbers were huge because there are always people that try playing on release, some of these variety streamers that pull tens of thousands of viewers alone. From what I've seen the tournament viewership is still experiencing growth and we haven't even had a truly big offline tournament yet.
csgo is the perfect comparison because it showed that regardless how initially terrible a game can be, it can make it all the way to the top as an FPS esport title.
on the other hand, it's a terrible comparison on all fronts because blizzard openly stated that the game caters to casuals and was not developed with esports in mind. which renders all esport related discussions pointless, but whatever..
given the nature and pace of the game, unless a complete overhaul in map design and ult mechanics takes place, i don't think there's much they can do to make it spectator friendly to the general populace. however, it's pretty fucking stupid to assume it's "boring" or "unfriendly" to watch (as people do in this thread) while comparing it to a moba, especially when the game is at its infancy with ~5 heroes per class atm. (they have 15 heroes in the making as we speak btw)
as far as i'm concerned, it's just as terrible and unfriendly of a spectator experience as LoL/Dota when you have no fundamental understanding of the heroes or meta
i don't think it's dull, not payload mode at least. it's an easy game to get into, no doubt, but just as anything else, it's up to your opponent and your team to define how hard or easy it is to play.
at its current state, it's definitely less forgiving than say quake TDM and allows almost no room to recover from mistakes once the first kill goes down, hence the constant snowballing effect.
i love the game and i'd love to see it succeed in esports, but it all depends on the extent that blizzard willing to commit and address competition. so far at least, they're doing a far greater job than the negligent retards over at valve-csgo filtering feedback from the community and being transparent with it.
The thing is that from what I've heard I doubt CSGO got where it's at because they fixed it as an esport. They added some nice skinner box style elements to it which might have been a factor.
isn't the spectator experience pretty much the same to dota/lol though? if you have no fundamental knowledge of the heroes/meta, you have no idea what's going on?
second that, somewhat fun to play, boring as hell to watch ... just do not get what is going on there ...
quakeworld dm6 match in quakecon was still understandable and good to watch, but overwatch is just a big mess
If you watch Cypher stream, he does so pretty crazy shit and it's actually not bad to watch. I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes the best OW player. Cooller is getting really really good too.
Anyway, watching a good player's stream is decent (even if you've never played before, which is true in my case), it's just very hard to watch when the tourneys are casted and they switch focus all over the place. That's why I think they should stick with one team's perspective per round since all the modes are basically attack and defend, even the escort... you're just attacked/defending a moving object. But they probably won't do that.
I think a lot of the old pro's that played actively ql in the early 2009-2012 time will come back for QC and a lot new stars will shine. We had them even in ql... remember players like bodzo, burnedd, etc? :)