We were a small group of people watching Overwatch when it went into closed beta. A few of us came from Team Fortress 2, some of us were huge fans of Blizzard games, some loved FPSers and some just loved how Overwatch looked. Then there were some that were really interested in the idea of Overwatch, couldn’t wait to play it, but for some reason, watching someone else play it wasn’t really their thing. And I heard this a lot during the beginning… Or well, to be fair, I heard it all through beta and still to this day. (Just not nearly as often though.) “I don’t know, I just don’t like watching this game.” But a few of us were still drawn to viewing Overwatch gameplay.
Memers, streams and the very first events
We sat by A_seagull as he went from 200 viewers to 2000 viewers. Some of us ventured into the meme-filled territory that was Tvique’s channel. And quite a few of us, actually, watched Overwatch as an evolving esport. Overwatch closed beta was released on October 27th, and the very first tournament took place early in November thanks to SombreroGG. He held a small invitational where 8 teams competed.
Since this was the very first tournament, people started raising questions about everything from hero balance to graphics quality to… Yeah, the gaming community can be a bit too critical at times. But one of the most valid questions was “what game mode will Overwatch be using?” Twitch employee and Overwatch fanatic Fishstix tested “stopwatch” mode in his “Fishstix’s Invitational” that he held in November 2015. People liked this mode, especially the people that came from TF2, and were used to it since before.
The other big issue at that time was the spectator client. It was buggy and cluttered, and it was generally hard to see what was going on. Blizzard fixed this later on though, and towards the end of closed beta the spectator client looked much better, even though some people would, even today, say it could use some work.
(Old spectator mode. And no, that's not just a bad quality picture, no one could ever read the red text.)
Early Tournaments
Besides Fishstix’s Invitational, the beta was never short of tournaments. Just in November alone there were the aforementioned two , as well as GosuGamers' own weekly for example. The first GG tournaments took place on the 28th and 29th of November and had a prize pool of $120, which was a lot considering the game was still in the closed beta and, hadn’t been in the beta for long either. (Compare that to the GosuGamers' NA weekly that last weekend had a base prize pool of $500 and then donations and such on top of that.) The open tournaments that took place in November/December had at least 16 teams competing. Not bad for being one/two months into the beta. People were obviously hungry for competitive Overwatch.
Second "half" of the Beta
Then the beta went down for an extended break between the middle of December and late February, but the people wanted more! If we look at the GG weeklies again, they were back up and running at the end of February with a prize pool of $360 and 16 teams competing for the EU tournament. We also had some other tournaments. King of the Watch (a tournament that started during the first “half” of the closed beta) continued to show some of the best Overwatch that could be seen at the moment, with some really good teams. (Like the old IDDQD, now EnvyUs with a slightly different roster, and FlatEarth/Creation eSports). One Hit Club had their 2nd tournament in February where 11 teams signed up, and the old “Google Me” team, that is now Cloud9, already showed strength.
Wanting to make the game great
Someone came up with the name “Onlywatch” early in the beta. (Yes, the community can be really witty at times.) At the very first day of Overwatch’s closed beta, the game had 140,000 viewers on twitch, which was, to be honest, a lot of Onlywatchers. Although the viewer count then slowly decreased, there was still a group of people that cared for the game and wanted to make it a good esport. There was us that just watched the game, maybe read Reddit and dreamt of the days when Onlywatch seized to exist.
But then there were the enthusiasts that took those extra little step to make sure that the growing esports scene would become even bigger and better. The closed and open beta had 67 tournaments, which all of course helped greatly to increase the hype for the game. Then there were content creators, writers, streamers, sponsors, casters… The list can go on forever, about who and what people showed love and interest for the game and helped it grow. If these people weren’t enough, we also had a strong 9.7 million players (!) that played the game during the open beta. So, are you now sad that you missed those early days of Onlywatch? Don’t worry, the game has every reason to become a great esport, so just buckle up and wait to see what’s in store next.
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