Banana Culture and Blizzard team up to bring viewers the Overwatch Premier Series that will eventually tie in to APAC 2017.
With the North American and Korean scenes dominating Overwatch currently, China wants in on the action. During the Spring and Summer seasons, the top Chinese teams will battle it out with major prizepools on the line as well as a spot in the 2017 APAC Premier.
The setup for this series is as follows: currently, the Preseason of the Spring event is coming to and end. A total of 32 teams started off, spread out over 4 double-elimination brackets. The top 2 of each bracket will qualify for the main event, while the 3rd place finishers get placed in the wildcard knockout bracket which will produce the final 2 participants.
Teams such as Invictus Gaming, Newbee and Snake are still in the running to qualify, but many teams have already fallen. Those teams will get a second opportunity, after the Spring event, when the process restarts for the Summer event. Both the Spring and Summer events have confirmed prizepools of over $100,000! The APAC Premier 2017 will reportedly feature more than double that, which should help grow the scene while the OWL goes through out its inaugural run.
You can imagine that the Overwatch Premier Series will provide top Overwatch content for months to come, if you know Chinese or are fine with a lack of English commentary. The games will be broadcast on the Chinese source here: http://www.panda.tv/hd/owps20170316.html.
We will continue to cover the matches, and all information can be found at our Event Hub. There, you will also find the current Preseason brackets.
For more competitive Overwatch news, follow us @GosuOverwatch.
