Reddit ran ablaze with threads about the poor viewership stats of Masters Tour Arlington, decrying Activision-Blizzard as money-grubbing monsters with little concern about the health of competitive Hearthstone. The takes were so hot you could have cooked a full course dinner on them, and most of them were wrong: this is not a poor third-party TO struggling to jack up the numbers for a children’s card game but an afterthought alongside the OWL deal. Not much else made sense about the outcry either: there’s much more to the decision than just the loss of viewership from one Masters Tour to the next.
The Many Kinds of Tournament Organizers
There seems to be a misconception amongst the Redditocracy when it comes to the deal struck between Activision and YouTube. With the Overwatch League treated as its big-ticket item, it’s not the Hearthstone numbers analysts will be poring over in the future. In fact, a recent Esports Observer article has pretty much confirmed it to be a freebie, a token to ensure you can tout in marketing blurbs how the company’s entire esports portfolio is now on your platform. A drop was likely baked into the calculations when considering the performance of YouTube Gaming over Twitch, one which would be especially apparent at the first outing. No doubt everyone’s expecting an improvement by the time Grandmasters rolls around. And if it isn’t there (overall, not just in terms of Hearthstone), there are likely clauses in the deal to match that fact, and when the time comes to renegotiate, there’s always the option to part ways. Even that wouldn’t be the end of the world.
We’ve seen similar stories in esports before: take ESL’s recent disastrous deal with Facebook Gaming as an example. They decided to move the broadcasts of their flagship CS:GO competition (the Pro League) away from Twitch to the social media behemoth, a platform which was woefully ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of such an endeavor. Many times, the broadcast was literally unwatchable, the video player giving up the ghost every few minutes or so. Did it mean the end of Counter-Strike as we knew it? Of course not – the moment the deal was over, ESL ran back to Twitch as fast as they could.
Of course, the parallels are not exact due to the fact that CS has a healthy third-party tournament scene while Hearthstone esports has long been monopolized by the developers, but it’s nevertheless worth noting that no such deal lasts forever, especially not if the results aren’t there. Also, since Activision-Blizzard exercises complete control over the broadcasts of most of their games (for better or for worse, considering how happy the StarCraft community was after they recently gave up this stranglehold), the incentives are vastly different. As an independent tournament organizer, selling ad slots and securing sponsorship deals matter a lot, and viewer numbers have a direct impact on the kind of deal you can wrangle out of your partners at the end of the day. For the suits behind Blizzard, a single OWL slot likely has a bigger financial implication than the entire Hearthstone circuit. Even a large drop in viewership is just a prestige loss, and if you consider how laughably simple they made the entire esport, they’ve already saved all the money they could ever ask for.
Hearthstone Esports’ Maslow Pyramid
Some perspective is badly needed about where we are now. Last year, the official Hearthstone esport competitions comprised of three LAN events, plus the BlizzCon finals where most of the logistics are already baked in for Blizzard, plus HGG. 2019’s Global Games was the most muted affair of them all, the entirety of it played online and a paltry $75 000 offered as the overall prize pool. Most of the Grandmasters competition also runs online, in the exact same client as the regular game. It’s as barebones as it gets, with as few people involved (including competitors) as possible. Compare this to any other serious esport, even with the few extra LAN events slated for 2020.
The online qualifiers for the Masters Tour events also don’t come with any financial incentive, and it says a lot about the previous years that even the packs offered are considered a step forward. They even pocket a decent chunk of the esports bundle’s sales instead of offering it all to the competitors! For a product as small-scale as this one, its role as a sweetener in the YouTube deal is more than enough, poor numbers compared to Twitch or not. The entire GM concept revolves around churning out as much content as possible, much like their approach to the Overwatch League. This drop in viewership will likely only concern the semi-casual viewers and no one else. There’s a reason the Hearthstone broadcasts commanded precisely zero negotiating power at the table, again, if you believe the reporting by Esports Observer.
It’s also worth mentioning that we’re in the “offseason” of Grandmasters, making Arlington even less relevant for Hearthstone fans in the grand scale of things. In that sense, it was the perfect test case before the GM matches are rolled out on YouTube, and though there are no doubt many kinks to iron out, there is no reason for the sort of outcry as we’ve seen on Reddit. For the people high up the food chain, a stabilization of OWL numbers is worth a million times more than anything Hearthstone-related – and as for those who are closely involved with the competitive side of this game, the promises and specifics offered at the recent GM summit (which we are of course not privy to) was enough to convince even the wavering participants to stick around for the next season. By the way, have you ever seen an esport where the top players are actively considering to leave the developer-sponsored big-ticket event, or in the case of dog, actually make that leap of faith?
All in all, Hearthstone and its esports component is just a tiny cog in a grand machine, and no one will sweat the precipitous drop in viewer count for its events as long as the flagship titles deliver and the monetary aspect of the deal works for both parties. Look at it this way: has it helped Hearthstone’s esports structure in any way when top tournaments easily had six-digit view counts at the business end of things? If you’re concerned about the state of competitive Hearthstone, raise the alarm about the lack of variety in Grandmasters and the barren state of the second tier of competition (much akin to Dota), not to mention the lack of in-game tournament options: these are a lot more pressing issues than the viewership of an off-season event just after it was moved to a different platform.
