Mentioned in this article Games: Overwatch

During the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, California, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick confirmed the company is putting together a professional Overwatch league.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”What we’re doing is creating professional content,” Kotick said, as reported by TheStreet. “We’re organizing around teams and leagues. You will have the Overwatch league which will have a certain number of teams. Those teams will be a combination of professional sports teams as owners and endemic sports teams as owners.”[/perfectpullquote]

He continued, saying that fans should expect to see more professional leagues with live spectating experiences in actual arenas. Allowing other channels to broadcast Activision’s esports titles isn’t out of the question, either, but it’ll come with a fee: “The real question though is the way they’re watching today is over-the-top, so we have our own channel MLG, which is our broadcast channel for professional esports,” Kotick said, as reported by AdWeek. “What we view our opportunity set as is Leslie [Moonves, CBS CEO,] or ESPN wants to pay for the rights, a greater amount, that we can monetize on our own channel, we’ll take that.”

Kotick also mentioned that across Activision Blizzard games, 500 million players are active monthly—a number of users, he said, which is five times more than that of Netflix.