Overwatch League Season 6 set for massive changes, Blizzard has big task to ensure positive viewership numbers

Loading

Overwatch 2's esports scene, the Overwatch League, is one of the best in the world, a stage where the best talents come together to strut their stuff, so fans always look forward to the action unfolding. Luckily, the starting date for the OWL has been revealed, so they can mark their calendars as they look ahead to some scintillating action from the highly-anticipated event.

Organized by Blizzard Entertainment, the Overwatch League will feature 20 teams from across the globe battling it out to come out on top as the best Overwatch 2 pros. There is also regional pride at stake, so the season ends up being quite a rollercoaster.

Overwatch League (OWL) Season 6 will quite literally be the biggest ever

The upcoming edition of the event will kick off on March 23, 2023, with the Offseason, before the real deal begins on April 27, 2023, with the Qualifiers, while March 13, 2023, is the last day for teams to submit their registrations. Each side must have six members signed before the start of the OWL 2023 season. The Knockouts begin in June, followed by the Midseason Madness.

The Qualifiers, Knockouts, Play-Ins, and Playoffs then run from July to September, before we get to the Grand Finals in October. The specific dates will be released by Blizzard Entertainment soon.

Crucially, the tournament is set to undergo quite a few changes that could massively impact the league in its first full year of playing Overwatch 2. The biggest talking point of the new season is with regard to the new format that aims to address any regional imbalance. The OWL will now allow Contenders teams to participate against the Overwatch League teams, which has been a request from organizations and fans for a while.

This also means that from February, Contenders teams will partake in tournaments to decide who plays the Overwatch League teams. It is here that the League is divided into the East and West regions, with both intercepting in LAN tournaments in the summer and at the end of the season.

Korea, Asia-Pacific, and Australia/New Zealand sides will play in divisional tournaments, and the winners get to play the Overwatch League East Division teams. Overwatch Contenders teams from North America and Europe will do battle in a Pro-Am event from March 23, before Overwatch League teams start their Spring Qualifier games.

The West will see the League kick off with a professional/amateur tournament where Contenders teams battle OWL teams. Post this, regular play will resume for only OWL teams.

In the East, the League will become bigger to get in Contenders teams, who will again face off against OWL teams throughout the year.

With four Chinese teams (Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Chengdu) not allowed to legally play Overwatch 2 or most other Blizzard games in the country after an agreement with NetEase to operate came to a close, this tweak has been brought in to “ensure minimal disruption.”

Also, two teams will be seen under new guises, with Paris Eternal “relocating” to Vegas and being reborn as Vegas Eternal. Philadelphia Fusion, meanwhile, has completely rebranded itself as Seoul Infernal after relocating to Seoul.

This is good news for South Korea, one of Overwatch’s biggest markets, as it gets an additional team, but it is also a negative for Europe, which has lost a team to America, which has enough representation as it is.

At the end of it all, these sides will take part in a lengthy process involving regional and group stages to seal their berths in the Playoffs.

Additionally, the minimum age group to participate in the event has been brought down from 18 to 17 years so to facilitate more talents coming into the pipeline and help give them a chance to start their pro careers. However, it is to be remembered that this change is not final and could still be changed by the organizers later.

OWL will look to raise viewership numbers after the disappointment of Season 5

The fifth season of the Overwatch League saw teams play on the Overwatch 2 beta, with the finals being played on the newly-released version of the FPS shooter. It began on May 5, 2022, and ended on November 7, 2022, with Dallas Fuel beating San Francisco Shock 4-3 to win the Grand Finals and be crowned winners of the event.

The Playoffs were quite the rip-roaring success, but the rest of the event lagged behind in viewership numbers. With these numbers in place, it is clear that the organizers will have their work cut out to bring in viewers for Season 6.

The Playoffs in 2022 were when the league got the most traction across the five stages of the league, as it notched the highest Hours Watched, Peak Viewers, and Average Viewers by miles. It helped that this was the final stage of the event, with the winners to be decided at the end of it all.

Intriguingly, the two teams who consistently pulled in the most viewers across the five stages were also the ones who reached the Grand Finals. Dallas Fuel and San Francisco Shock were involved in three of the five matches that were watched the most across the competition, including two matches against each other. The other clash was their meeting at the Summer Showdown, which in fact drew more Peak Viewers than their Grand Finals affair.

This bodes well for the 2023 event as the two most recent finalists are clearly big draws, and that is bound to bring in more eyeballs when the OWL Season 6 starts. But Blizzard will need to do more to ensure this season does not become as big a miss, literally, as the 2022 one.