7 - ‘Too Many Koreans’: Esports Biopower and South Korean Gaming Infrastructure

Summary

On 10 January 2018, the inaugural season of the Overwatch League (also commonly abbreviated to OWL) began. As a major professional esports league for the first-person shooter game Overwatch by Blizzard Entertainment, OWL was not the first large-scale, global, franchised esports league. But it was doing something unique that would set it apart from other esports leagues for games such as League of Legends, Dota 2, and Call of Duty: It was attempting a geolocation model in esports. Unlike other esports leagues with endemic esports organisations that had few, if any, city-based ties, OWL would feature city-based teams, with branding and ‘identities’ tied to different cities and attempts to create local fanbases in those cities. While the first two seasons of the OWL would be held at the Blizzard Arena in Burbank, Calif., from the third season onwards the league would attempt to institute a new system of ‘home’ and ‘away’ matches, with esports events being hosted in the teams’ home cities.

With the announcement of a geolocation model franchising system, endemic esports organisations (which are often founded and owned by people involved in esports, such as former professional players) that had fielded teams in Overwatch esports either quickly folded their operations or bought a city-based franchise spot for US$20 million. Examples of the former are FaZe Clan, Luminosity Gaming, and Splyce; the latter include Cloud9 and Immortals. Among the first twelve teams to join the league in its inaugural season in 2018 were the Los Angeles Valiant (owned by the US-based esports organisation Immortals), the London Spitfire (owned by the US-based esports organisation Cloud9), the New York Excelsior (owned by Sterling VC, which also owns the Major League Baseball team the New York Mets), and the Boston Uprising (owned by Robert Kraft of the Kraft Group, which also owns the popular American football team the New England Patriots). But, as was quickly noted by viewers and fans, the emphasis on cities did not translate into local players representing their cities and teams. As an ESPN esports journalist noted, this was due in part to ‘the Overwatch League's insistence on having a completely open league’ (Rand, 2018).