The Overwatch League (OWL) may very well be on its deathbed, with team owners all but expected to accept $6 million payouts to pull the plug on the fledgling league later this year. But will the same fate befall the Call of Duty League (CDL), which has experienced its own troubles and shares several owners with the OWL?
All signs point to yes. And whenever the coup de grâce comes, it will be a sad day. That’s not because I’ll miss the cities, many of which are represented in name only, the “unique” team brands that unnecessarily detach CDL teams from existing popular esports organizations, or the harmful exclusion of and neglect shown to CoD‘s path-to-pro Challengers scene.
I’ll be sad because we—fans, players, and staff—will have wasted four years on a silly and costly experiment led by men with too much money and not enough sense trying to make us the NFL of CoD.
The latest wave of negative news was delivered earlier today as if a doctor was informing a patient of a terminal illness, although it only indirectly affected the CDL. In its second-quarter earnings report, Activision Blizzard said that at the end of the ongoing OWL season, team owners will vote to either continue the league under a new operating agreement or accept a termination fee of $6 million per franchise.
This development came just a day after Activision Blizzard laid off around 50 employees in its esports department in what one of those now ex-employees told The Verge “seems like a significant gutting of Activision Blizzard Esports.” And this wasn’t just an OWL-specific round of firings.
Related: Overwatch League in jeopardy after layoffs, owners to vote on competition’s future
Among the layoffs was CDL senior producer Nicholas Haanschoten, who announced today his “entire Content team were laid off yesterday after another record season.” Haanschoten had been a producer for Blizzard for more than six years, logging time with Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and the CDL, the latter of which since 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The OWL and CDL alike are the brainchildren of Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, and Kotick was especially vital in convincing billionaires like Robert Kraft to invest in the OWL. Kraft is most notably the owner of the New England Patriots, and thanks to Kotick’s pitch of an NFL-like esports league, he’s now also the owner of two Activision Blizzard franchises: the OWL’s Boston Uprising and CDL’s Boston Breach (via a merger with New England-based organization Oxygen Esports).
But Kotick’s controversial tenure at the top of Activision Blizzard is nearing an end; Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the CoD and Overwatch publisher is likely to happen by the end of the year. And while Microsoft supports some esports efforts—it acquired tournament site Smash.gg in 2020 and has long owned Halo—the CDL would be a pretty big undertaking for the tech giant. The most important point to said undertaking, though, is that it would almost certainly be unprofitable as well.
Money, moolah, coin, paper, scratch… That’s what it’s all about. It’s the motivation behind the layoffs, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the futures of the OWL and CDL, and life in general. “Can money can be made” and “how much” are likely the questions that are being or have already been asked when debating between keeping the CDL alive or taking it to a farm upstate.
If the Los Angeles Thieves, the 2022 CDL world champions, can lose $2.5 million in the same year they win a Major and a world title, the model probably has to be looked at again. And that appears to be what many teams are already doing. With more than two-thirds of the league’s players unrestricted free agents this offseason, salaries are rumored to be down across the board as teams try to survive a period of divestment and decreased interest that is sometimes referred to as the “esports winter.”
How long the cold, harsh winds of competitive gaming will keep blowing is anyone’s guess, but the OWL will likely be dead and buried by the winter solstice. The timing of the CDL’s death is more mysterious, though, as unlike the OWL, which is set to conclude its season on Oct. 1, CoD‘s exclusive league is already in the midst of its offseason.
Related: CDL rostermania: All confirmed CoD roster changes after 2023 Call of Duty League season
Players are being signed to contracts and are looking forward to next season, which would normally begin a month or two after the release of the next CoD title. But if the OWL ceases to exist in its current form sometime in October and the heavily rumored Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) releases in November, will the CDL actually go forth and kick off its fifth season in December? That seems unlikely.
And that’s why I woke up and was immediately overwhelmed with sadness. The news today barely mentioned the CDL, but the writing on the wall for the league became a lot easier to read today as a result.
Maybe better days are ahead for the CDL (or however the next iteration of professional CoD is acronymized), but many of us thought the same thing in 2019 when the CDL formed. And here we are, four years later, hoping that we will someday be able to get back to building a more sustainable, equitable, and enjoyable ecosystem for the esport we love.
