↑ Hearthstone Esports (June 2, 2020). Activision Blizzard and Google have teamed up for a deal to exclusively stream live esports broadcasts, including Overwatch League, Call of Duty League, and Hearthstone Esports, on YouTube. YouTube. Google Cloud will also serve as the infrastructure for Activision and Blizzard’s online gamesActivision Blizzard and Google have teamed up for a deal to exclusively stream live esports broadcasts, including Overwatch League, Call of Duty League, and Hearthstone Esports, on YouTube. The entire GM concept revolves around churning out as much content as possible, much like their approach to the Overwatch League. Did it mean the end of Counter-Strike as we knew it? The expanded relationship will use Google’s worldwide cloud services to offer “optimal personalized interactions, as Activision Blizzard can tap into Google Cloud’s AI tools to offer curated recommendations for in-game offers and differentiated gaming experiences.”The multiyear deal also means Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch League has a new home. The Hearthstone World Championship is the official Hearthstone world championship and the finale for the Hearthstone Grandmasters system. Starting today, Google and Activision Blizzard have entered what may go down as one of the bigger deals in gaming history, as YouTube will be the AAA publisher's exclusive streaming partner for Overwatch League, Hearthstone eSports, and more. With the Overwatch League treated as its big-ticket item, it’s not the Hearthstone numbers analysts will be poring over in the future. YouTube gains exclusive streaming rights for Overwatch League, Call of Duty League, and Hearthstone esports. ↑ Hearthstone Hearthstone Grandmasters returns for Season 2 beginning August 14! Now we do: With its two-year Twitch deal now expired, Overwatch League is moving to YouTube. Overwatch and Call of Duty leagues move to YouTube in exclusive Google dealInfinity Ward working on a fix for Call of Duty: Warzone’s nightmare bugFortnite is letting Epic Games break every rule in video gamesThe battle royale maker has a history of fighting arbitrary rules

46:09. Also, since Activision-Blizzard exercises complete control over the broadcasts of most of their games (for better or for worse, considering how happy the StarCraft community was after they recently gave up this stranglehold), the incentives are vastly different.

For the people high up the food chain, a stabilization of OWL numbers is worth a million times more than anything Hearthstone-related – and as for those who are closely involved with the competitive side of this game, the promises and specifics offered at the recent GM summit (which we are of course not privy to) was enough to convince even the wavering participants to stick around for the next season. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. It’s as barebones as it gets, with as few people involved (including competitors) as possible.

For the suits behind Blizzard, a single OWL slot likely has a bigger financial implication than the entire Hearthstone circuit. While the first two seasons of the esports league were broadcast on Twitch, the 2020 season will stream exclusively on YouTube (outside of China) starting Feb. 8.Activision’s inaugural season of the Call of Duty League — which kicks off Friday — will also stream on YouTube, as will Blizzard’s official Hearthstone Esports tournaments. In that sense, it was the perfect test case before the GM matches are rolled out on YouTube, and though there are no doubt many kinks to iron out, there is no reason for the sort of outcry as we’ve seen on Reddit. Tweet. By the way, have you ever seen an esport where the top players are actively considering to leave the developer-sponsored big-ticket event, or in the case of dog, actually make that leap of faith?All in all, Hearthstone and its esports component is just a tiny cog in a grand machine, and no one will sweat the precipitous drop in viewer count for its events as long as the flagship titles deliver and the monetary aspect of the deal works for both parties. In fact, We’ve seen similar stories in esports before: take ESL’s recent disastrous deal with Facebook Gaming as an example. Compare this to any other serious esport, even with the few extra LAN events slated for 2020.The online qualifiers for the Masters Tour events also don’t come with any financial incentive, and it says a lot about the previous years that even the packs offered are considered a step forward.