OWL league didn’t blink at virus
Houston Outlaws never stopped playing in pandemic, drawing crowds of online fans
As the Astros, Rockets and Dynamo return to action after months on hiatus, one local pro team never stopped playing during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Houston Outlaws, which play in the esports Overwatch League, or OWL, continued to thrill their fans throughout the live-sports drought, battling opponents from cities from Toronto to Paris to Shanghai in competitions.
Since Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the National Basketball Association interrupted or postponed seasons, the Outlaws have played 17 matches and compiled a record of 6-11.
Before the season is over,
Houston will play at least 21 league games through August.
The Outlaws and the Overwatch League returned to their online roots after the league shut down live events that attract hundreds, if not thousands of raucous fans and moved them to YouTube.
It also restructured the season, much as the National Basketball Association, Major League Soccer and National Women’s Soccer League later did, with tournaments played without people in the stands
The Overwatch League created a series of regional tournaments through its May Melee, Summer Showdown and Countdown Cup series, raising the level of competition for players and engagement for fans watching on YouTube.
“There’s a lot of different things that we’re doing right now to really shape how we want to be perceived going forward,” said Ashley DeWalt, the Outlaws’ director of marketing and brand strategy.
An original
The Houston franchise, owned by Florida media company Beasley Broadcasting Group, was one of the original 12 teams when the Overwatch League launched in 2018. The league expanded to 20 teams in 2019.
In 2020, the league moved to holding more homestands — weekendlong competitions involving several teams, hosted by one team. Homestands were set to become a key component of the Overwatch League’s business model.
In addition to making money, homestands can call attention to esports and expand the fanbase.
The Outlaws sold 2,000 single and two-day passes for its homestand in late February at the Revention Music Center downtown, where fans watched elite videogamers compete on big screens. The average attendee spent $100 between tickets, concessions and merchandise.
Homestands “help legitimate esports,” said Tobias Scholz, an assistant professor at the University of Siegen in Germany and author of eSports is Business: Management in the World of Competitive Gaming. “It is something that rivals, for example, an NBA game.”
In March, however, with coronavirus cases surging, the Overwatch League suspended homestands and moved matches online. That left the league and the Outlaws facing challenges to similar other pro leagues and teams playing without fans in the stands — and the revenues those fans generate
Ticket sales from the Outlaws’ February homestand and another originally scheduled for early August were slated to account for 15 percent of the team’s revenue, according to Outlaws chief operating officer Lori Burgess. Most of Houston’s revenue (70 percent) comes from sponsorships by companies that include the Texas video game and electronics retailer GameStop, the Georgia restaurant chain Zaxby’s, and Reliant, the Houston retail electricity company.
Getting creative
The rest comes from merchandise sales, fees from streaming and video platforms, and prize money paid by the Overwatch League. Players, who earn at least $50,000 a year, have continued to get paid following the league’s move online.
To offset some of the losses from the cancellation of live events, the Outlaws and other teams have sought sponsors, held promotions and scheduled online events to attract fans..
At the end of May, for example, the Outlaws partnered with their Dallas rival, the Fuel, in an online skills competition called the Lone Star Challenge. The competition attracted sponsorships from Korean electronics maker Samsung, the San Antonio grocer H-E-B and Jack Links, the Wisconsin jerky and meat snack maker, among others
The event spanned three weeks and logged 27,800 hours of watch time on YouTube. KHOU aired an accompanying docuseries that chronicled the lives of players competing. The team said it netted more than $160,000 from the venture.
Jon Spector, vice president of Overwatch Esports, which is owned by Activision Blizzard, a unit of the California game developer Blizzard Entertainment, said events like the Lone Star Challenge engage fans and help teams reach new ones. Spector added that it’s too soon to gauge how the pandemic will affect the 2021 season, but Scholz believes it will push the league to become more flexible and more creative in how the games are played.
Place in the sportscape
Regardless what shape the league’s 2021 schedule takes, Burgess said the team will continue planning more projects independent of the league. The team is also trying to learn more about its fans and how to reach them.
Outlaws executives hope these initiatives won’t just help them chart a path through this season, but also cement the Outlaws into the Houston sports landscape.
“We’re trying to make this be something that the mainstream consumer, the mainstream business, the mainstream marketer understands,” Burgess said. “This is an online sport, so in a way it makes it easier to adapt (to the pandemic).”