It Is official! Season One of Overwatch Contenders Starting Mid-August

Not that long ago, Season Zero of Overwatch Contenders finished with eUnited being crowned a champion in Europe. At the same time, Immortals took the crown in North America. However, teams will not have a lot of time to relax as Season One of this competition will be starting in a little more than a month.

Overwatch and Blizzard have had a lot of problems in the last couple of months. Namely, many teams stepped down from the competition and released their teams, but the company continued with their plans of launching Overwatch Contenders. The main idea behind this competition was that it will be a kind of development league for the teams participating in the Overwatch League.

Considering that Overwatch League is far from being launched, Overwatch Contenders has taken life on its own. It seems that it has become a competition almost completey independent of Overwatch League. To a surprise of many, this competition proved to be very popular in both regions.

Season Zero as a Test Phase

When Blizzard announced Overwatch Contenders, they stated that this first season will be a testing phase. Because of that, the prize pool for this event was lowered to $50,000 to see how teams and fans would react to it.

Since the very beginning of the competition, fans have reacted surprisingly well. This is even more important considering Contenders do not feature any of the best teams. Those teams are waiting for the news about the Overwatch League.

Despite that, Contenders became very popular Overwatch competition. It allowed new teams and young and independent players to play an official tournament without having to represent any of the organizations. Because of that, it is no wonder that Season Zero featured several teams that nobody heard of before. There were many new, young, and very talented players that will surely find their home in some of the biggest and best Overwatch teams.

The First Official Season

The first season was actually just a testing phase. With it being a successful test, Blizzard’s official Overwatch Contenders Season One will be starting this August. Several aspects will be changed in relation to Season Zero.

First of all, the prize pool for Season One will be $100,000. The prize pool will be the same in both, European as well as in the North American region. The competition in the group stage will last for six weeks, and it will feature offline finals that will be played sometimes in October.

Unlike Season Zero that only provided streaming for certain matches, fans will be able to stream all matches of the Season One on some of the Internet streaming platforms. Several teams from Season Zero have already secured their place in Season One. Other teams will be looking to reach this goal in the upcoming period.

Blizzard Continues as Planned

With the lack of Overwatch events, any tournament that features Overwatch will be very popular. This seems to be the line of thinking behind Blizzard’s decision to reduce the number of Overwatch tournaments.

Season Zero was a new competition or rather a new format of Overwatch competitions. This might be the reason why this event was so popular among the fans. Season One will actually prove how popular is this competition among the fans. Many of them are feeling pretty mad about Blizzard and their recent actions.