Are you telling me that shooting at shields for 5 minutes, over and over, didn't make for an entertaining spectator sport? 🤯

We need "Right Again" merch, or even better, "What about today, dickhead?" I would buy that in a heartbeat. Thanks for the content, Rich.

richard tombstone should say "i fucking tried"

As a scot who was originally a fan of overwatch and thus convinced myself I was a fan of owl. I remember just half assedly supporting the London spitfire team since it was in the UK and they won the 2nd season I think? When they won was the moment me nd my mate realised we hated the fucking game and we'd wasted so much time pretending it was a great esport nd you just had to be good to understand it lmao

"where's my breast milk" got me on the floor xDDDD

Your videos are always salacious and entertaining enough in an industry I personally have no stake in that I can relax for an hour or so. Look forward to your releases

Fucking hell, Rich. You're gonna have to slow down on being right, Im having trouble keeping the list up to date!

happy to be here, happy to see AB and their lies burn

22:47 I always thought it was amusing that the "London" team was completely Korean. I remember seeing a post on social media where the team visited London, and it was the first time most or any of them had ever set foot there. That's just absolutely hilarious to me. How are you supposed to represent a city/country you've never even _been_ to? The attempt at a location-based approach was always so stupid. It's simply not compatible with esports. At least not in this way.

They started to get rid of the personalities, hired yes man commentators, and filling rosters with kids we have never even heard of.

The zodiac bit was just... chef's kiss.

“Where did I put my breast milk?” - Richard Lewis, 2023

I have been EAGERLY waiting for this video

First RL vid in a while, cheers mates. Does Sam still do videos with Richard?

A word for Hongyu "Eddie" Chen, he's a really good journalist, always been my go-to for the real shit happening on the Chinese scene.

Another important thing about the media deal is now that they are owned by Microsoft they can’t do a media deal like they did with KZfaq because that included them using the Google Cloud and the same thing goes for twitch and Amazon.

28:40 Fun fact, Jade Emperor Yu Huang is a playable character in SMITE.

The tangents are my personal favorite part of your videos. Algorithm

lol love the ending. Esports not working out? just pivot into an entirely different industry!

Only Blizzard can somehow make a business model that's worth less than an NFT. They just right-click saved the region just like that.

From day one the franchise model looked more artificial than a Source filmmaker animation of Widowmaker getting her cheeks clapped

"I can still read esports... like a BUUUK" Fantastic content as ever, thanks Rich!

Now i really want to read that dexerto article.

I dont even play Overwatch (or any of Blizzards other games for that matter) and I just sat through an hour long talk of a grumpy old man explaining what the fuck is happening there Very nice video :D

Banger video Richard!

The professional videogame churn is too much. I don't know how much it costs for an organization to invest in an upcoming game but it's felt like TSM, Faze and all the rest have thrown money like it's spagetti hoping that it sticks. League was a grassroots success but OW never really lived up to the hype. All these game developers have their fingers too deep in the professional scene. Nobody 'owns' football or basketball so it's easy and cheap to throw something together. Cheap money is over. Most people just don't know how bad it's going to get.

I love the side rants, cant wait for the zodiac piece, wonder what 2023 will be

to be fair, it wasnt terribly hard to predict the owl to end up a failure. at the time the franchise spots were 2-3x as expensive as the established lcs for a game that really hasnt made its name as an esport yet. thats just bonkers. i just have the impression that a lot of it is just american business culture, they have a lot of money and they love investing it. however this culture finds its issues in esports. just compare the NA LCS and the LEC/EU LCS now and 10 years ago.

id be interested in the financials/revenue info of blizzard/act , is it just cod and wow expansions at this point?

Saturday morning just got so much better

how the hell richard even knows the history of the chinese zodiacs is beyond me cause even i forget this stuff meanwhile i research it a lot of the time for lightnovel purposes.....

I really, really hope this article gets published

The guy who runs the Philadelphia Fusion is the son of the CEO of Comcast. Just throwing his dads money into the fire lol

As a Starcraft 2 fan, and someone who is part of the Starcraft community. I do miss you in the scene, i never understood thoose who pushed you away.

Amazing ad placement RL

I watched OWL only for and when Dafran joined Atlanta Reign. I can bet they had at least 50% viewership increase in those few weeks.

Love the tangents.

Fission : you split heavy (relatively, like 1 uranium atom heavy) into smaller pieces. Fusion, you combine light atoms into a bigger one. Ez

Team rebrands after a move aren’t totally uncommon in MLB or NHL. The Colorado Avalanche were the Quebec Nordiques for a long time. That being said, I think that’s largely cultural. Fusion is also a terrible name but it’s esports so the name of the team is more often than not has to be the worst thing ever. Love the new content.

Maaaan, fuck that. I like your side-quest stories, especially the ones from your past. For the most part, I find them captivating.

47:00 lol

Tangents ftw! Never cut those out!

"He died right " hahaha thanks for the content

Absolutely love every time I hear "you know who you are" fucking brilliant.

The 12 Esports Zodiacs: The Thief The Greedy The wasteful The prideful The Scumbag The Corrupt The Liar The Predator The up and coming star thrown to the side The One good guy who gets kicked out immediately The well loved Talent thrown out the door And Thorin

i love the tangents

The OWL Nord VPN tie in was incredible

wooooo over a million a year in fees to blizzard to have a team in OWL OMEGALUL

I loooove me an hour long ep

Banger

Was Smooya not available for comment?

The reckoning always comes

"Warcraft 3 Reforged - whoever is still playing that" - Thank god I only play the original Warcraft 3 TFT... who the fuck plays Reforged?

I seen richard lewis tombstone xD

Really funny to go see that year of the scumbag is on the top of my esports feed on dexerto.

Four franchised Chinese teams, and the country cannot even play the game. Good work Blizzard

Ow league will do the classic amber Heard move "we pledged the revenue" But yeah I have seen what happens when blizzard takes control of E-Sport with StarCraft. Pattern returned in wc3 and then I never believed in them again. It's always going to shit. In every franchise. And that's impressive consistent incompetence

Richard please write this book even if you’d need funding we’ll gofund it!

It's so cathartic watching badTF2 fall apart and die.

LIKE-A-BOOK

The only reason people were playing OW is because Blizz was injecting so much money trying to brute force OW into an eSport. This was bound to happen eventually.

Anyone not reading the Dexerto article is missing out big time

Hope the article gets published, the zodiac categories are hilarious

does the AB bullshit EVER end?

fair play

"... ya bitch' youtube users." 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Blizzard: People who don't even work here anymore once stumbled in to creating the two greatest RTS games in history, therefore we know more about esports than you.

fax gamers don't know that "Saccer" is a thing

it's like watching rats fight over a corpse.

The OWL should've stanned Luna

Nostradamus of Esports

What assets do the teams actually own? They can't sell their slot w/o Blizzard approval and their regional license has zero value.

The esports zodiac lmao

So the way we save esports, is by not by focusing on the competition itself? Brillant. Genius. I, think, I lost brain cells listening to that.

happy to see overwatch on the news...oh wait

Wait, kda is an actual thing? I thought it was just some skins.

I just hope Microsoft don't burn MDI, TGP and AWC

Great financial advice.

Perfect name for a/your book. "I Was Right!"

I honestly don't have sympathy for the teams since they were just deliberately buying into the league as a bigger fool scam. It was obvious no one would get their money's worth from this "investment"

I want to be an eccentric billionaire who funds random things I wanna see on a whim. One of them is a high budget documentary series about esports by Richard Lewis (after esport dies and If I make those billions)

"right again". Me after trying to get home after drinking a bottle of vodka and finishing my 6th circle around the block

Also who watches hour-long RL videos to not have tangents?

It was always doomed for the simple reason that AB for some dumb reason wanted to brute force Esports on games they've intentionally designed to be targeted for casuals with one button gimmicks, dumbed down mechanics, and especially weak carrying power in their team games. It's not shocking they also have no clue about what works in the Esports industry because they've long lost touch with what works in the games themselves.

We all saw this league failing how the money men couldn't see it is beyond me. Anyway getting collecting these W's Rich.

Is there any form of mental gymnastics that OW fanboys can employ to cope with this? Blizzard's name is mud in this industry now. No org will want anything to do with anything they organize after this clown show

Ah yes the Esports that, unlike Valorant having a sprawling untapped FPS multiregional fan base, is now dead in every country except Korea. Last time I checked only like 5% of the teams had any western player lol

Oh Richard. Every year is Year of the Scumbag.