This week Josh “Sideshow” Wilkinson said on Twitter that neither he or Bren have an agreement for 2022 as talent with the Overwatch League. Bren was a bit more final in his version of the announcement, saying it marks the end of their four years as broadcast talent with OWL.
Interviewed by Bonnie Qu for Upcomer, Wilkinson clarified that the door to the Overwatch League is not completely closed, but he felt it was unlikely it would happen. As far as he knows they haven’t been blacklisted, but the two haven’t heard from the League in a month and a half so they’re assuming they aren’t coming back and are making plans with other leagues for the year.
Wilkinson also added on Twitter that the two will still be around with Plat Chat.
Sideshow Overwatch
Last week representatives of the QA division of Raven Software, the studio behind Call of Duty, announced they had enough support from QA employees at the company to create the Game Workers Alliance (GWA).
The next step was for Activision Blizzard to recognize the union within a few days, but the giant has failed to do so and instead released a statement that they wouldn’t recognize a union unless all employees of Raven Software were a part of the union action, not just the QA division. (Polygon) Unfortunately, companies do not have to recognize unions and Activision Blizzard appears to be going that route.
TechCrunch reports that, at the same time, Activision Blizzard is restructuring Raven Software’s employees around the company. Activision Blizzard says it’s to “bring [Raven] into alignment with the best practices of other prominent Activision studios.” I say it’s quite a coincidence that employees are being moved around just as a unionization effort makes progress.
- Blizzard president Mike Ybarra said this week that “over the coming weeks” we’ll be hearing more news on Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo. It’s not really news but I guess it’s something.
- Former coach and analyst Harsha Bandi tweeted this week that he felt a major issue with the Overwatch League is how long its off-season is with almost no content in-between, and that other games still run tournaments.
- FRAN announced this week she may never stream again. She hasn’t for a bit now, but a post to TwitLonger outlined the harassment she was getting, from comments like donators saying they made her who she was, to receiving nonconsensual photos. FRAN also addressed the recent harassment campaign against her because of her support of NFTs. While I’m fully against NFTs myself, she does not deserve harassment.
- The Year of the Tiger Lunar New Year event started this week. Unlike past events, this one only has two legendary skins. In a forum post about the topic, CM AndyB said: “While we know that we’re offering fewer Legendary skins with this year’s event, the Skins team is hard at work on new content, with more Legendary skins planned for retail than any year prior. We’ll be sharing more information on this throughout the year.” In short, they know, but there is a lot more coming later this year.