After many months of absolutely no information about the upcoming Overwatch League Blizzard has finally released something concrete. As you might imagine from the title, we're talking about the seven initial Overwatch League teams, their home cities, as well as who exactly are their owners.
If you would like to hear this from Nate Nanzer, the Overwatch League Commissioner, you'll find the recently posted announcement video right below. On the other hand, if you're just interested in seeing which cities will have their own teams I'll also add a brief summary. Have a look:
The current team owners and their home cities are:
Boston - Robert Kraft, Chairman and CEO of the Kraft Group and the New England Patriots
New York - Jeff Wilpon, Co-Founder and Partner of Sterling.VC and COO of the New York Mets
Los Angeles - Noah Whinston, CEO of Immortals
Miami-Orlando - Ben Spoont, CEO and Co-Founder of Misfits Gaming
San Francisco - Andy Miller, Chairman and Founder of NRG Esports
Shanghai - NetEase
Seoul - Kevin Chou, Co-founder of Kabam
The Overwatch League is slated to begin later this year, and for its very first season all of the regular matches will be played at an esports arena in the Los Angeles area. Once teams develop their local venues the league will transition to a formal "home and away play" system. The schedule and ticket information has not been released just yet, but what we do know is that matches will be played each Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
While this might not be interesting to everyone, here's the basic idea of how the revenue will be shared within the Overwatch League: "The league will create value for team owners through advertising, ticketing and broadcast rights revenues, with teams receiving an equal share of all league-wide net revenues. Teams will also keep all local revenues generated through their home territory and venue up to a set amount each year, unprecedented in esports; above the set amount, a percentage is sent to the league’s shared revenue pool. In addition, teams will have a license to operate and monetize up to five amateur events in their home territory each year, and to benefit from the sale of league-affiliated fan items in Overwatch, with 50% of the revenues going into the net shared revenue pool for all teams."
Despite being a "global league" nothing has been announced about Europe or any of the other underrepresented regions, but according to Blizzard they are working on getting that sorted out as quickly as possible. I can only hope it'll be quick enough to stop the already malnourished competitive scene in Europe from simply moving to the US like a lot of teams have done so far.