Has Franchising in Esports Worked?

When Blizzard Entertainment initially announced the format for the Overwatch League a number of years ago, there were many sceptics suggesting that a franchised approach could be a little risky – asking teams that were still largely developing at the time to commit a large amount of money to enter, which at the time had been around $50 million, it was a big ask. Other games had done it relatively well through the natural progression – League of Legends being a perfect example as the North American seasonal approach with salaried players and requirements from the teams being an industry standard when none had really existed.

But has it worked? Well in some sense, yes. With the prior League of Legends example, it has been hugely successful and has led to organisations in esports replicating much of the success initially found there, and with the latest title to enter esports in Valorant looking to follow a similar blue print we may be able to see yet another example where franchising has worked well, but in the case of Overwatch League it had been a bit of a mixed bag – OWL wasn’t able to capture as big an audience as initially hoped, with numbers even now still being quite low compared to other big titles outside of Asia, it can be hard for many to justify the huge entry cost in order to compete.