The

Overwatch

League

Command

Center

The Overwatch League Command Center in OWL Season II thrilled esports fans with a best-in-class premium viewing experience.

Year

2018-2019

Clients

Twitch, Blizzard

Roles

Design Lead, Research Lead

Designing a new approach to the business of esports

As a broadcasting platform for enthusiastic gamers, Twitch’s history was deeply intertwined with the rise of esports. Starting with the first Dota 2 International in 2011, esports had effectively served as a discovery and customer acquisition lever for Twitch.

By 2018, esports had experienced massive growth in reach and popularity, but the price of content had increased commensurately. The nacent Overwatch League came to Twitch in 2018 at a $90M price tag, and with it the urgent question of how to monetize esports broadcasts more directly.

Overwatch League Season 1 started with a season-long subscription called the All-Access Pass. The All-Access Pass on Twitch was a hit with players and viewers, but most of its customer-facing value was driven by unique in-game cosmetics for Overwatch which were included with the Pass at a steep discount. Producing unique cosmetics specifically for the Pass proved to be taxing for the Overwatch dev team, so Blizzard had declared their intent to no longer provide cosmetics-driven rewards in OWL Season II.

As Twitch looked ahead to Season II, I was tasked with designing a premium viewing experience for Overwatch that could provide customer value on its own, sufficient to support a mid-tier price point.

Table of Contents

Engaging superfans and strategists

Seeing through the eyes of their idols

Bringing the whole match to viewers' fingertips

Curating an enhanced watch experience

Putting the freemium in premium

Making the magic happen

Results

Customer Research

Engaging superfans and strategists

Prior research indicated that exciting, highly-produced content like the Overwatch League was appealing to both social Twitch "superfans" who were interested in sharing and participating in high-energy live experiences, and leaned-back "strategists" who typically consume skilled or professional gameplay. Together these segments comprised just over half of regular Twitch viewers, with strategists holding a ~5% edge.

However, current esports broadcasts of the time were stuck in the middle. They were too overwhelming for casual fans -- Overwatch broadcasts in particular were known for their frenetic gameplay, amplified by disorienting camera cuts between first-person points of view. At the same time, a single broadcast stream was too superficial for engaged strategists who were interested in watching through the eyes of the best players.

During and after Season I, the team monitored chat in the dedicated All-Access Pass room and conducted research surveys on Season I Pass-holders. The Season I Pass had included a premium viewing experience called the "Command Center," but it was the lowest-rated Pass feature at 2.9 out of 5 stars. Customer comments reflected this rating:

"I'd say something interactive would be ideal, but even having multiple options would do wonders."

"I feel like if Command Centre was more modular and customizable to better suit my needs I'd be much happier using it."

"Being able to have the second screen always display a player of my choice or always being the top-down view would be fantastic."

PRODUCT Design

Leaning into what customers love

After an initial round of interviews with Overwatch League viewers, it became clear that player point-of-view (POV) streams would be Command Center’s killer app.

Twitch viewers were accustomed to seeing games through the streamer’s point-of-view but not in professional matches. If viewers could choose which player’s POV they were watching, for as long as they wanted, it would create the intimate, vicarious experience familiar to Twitch viewers and allow strategists to learn by seeing the game through the eyes of the players they admired.

I explored how we might empower viewers to browse, select, and watch a breadth of available streams within the context of the Twitch viewing experience.

Exploring stream selection within the bounds of the video

Moving towards modal stream-selection and theater mode

In usability tests of the Season II Command Center on web, all 14 participants expressed enthusiasm for the feature. As we expected, they expressed excitement at the prospect of assuming full control of their viewer experience and watching from the point-of-view of specific players. Additionally, participants expressed that the main broadcast and map-view streams were useful to provide context for both the overall game state and the main broadcast audio.

However, it became clear that relying on a modal stream-selection experience for every stream change created too much friction for users. Strategists wanted to be able to swap quickly between player POVs, and wanted the POV streams to be as large as possible so they could feel immersed in that view.

In response, I began exploring ways for viewers to pivot between a smaller, customizable set of stream options without leaving the watch experience.

Quick navigation via role-based, customizable presets

Direct links to POV streams in the top nav

UX DESIGN & Development

Bringing the whole match to their fingertips

To create an experience that felt simple and powerful, web and mobile clients required different approaches.

On small screens without rollover or focus states, we retained a modal stream-selection experience for clarity and simplicity. Once viewers had selected the streams that interested them, they could use simple gestures to manipulate the multi-stream layout or zoom in to focus on a single selected stream.

On web, we gave viewers direct access to each player POV stream and supplemental streams via the top navigation. To effectively distinguish POV streams in a way that was meaningful to Overwatch League viewers, we used iconography to signify each player’s in-game role, in combination with rollover/focus tooltips.

UX Design & Development

Curating an enhanced watch experience

As development progressed, Blizzard became interested in extending the Overwatch League brand more overtly into Command Center, as they had done in Season 1.

To this end, the Overwatch League broadcast team provided us with 12 precompiled “multiview” streams, in addition to the 12 POV streams, for integration into Command Center. Each multiview stream was comprised of a POV stream in the featured position, with the main broadcast and map-only streams in secondary positions, and live player stats in the margins.

In order to preserve the simplicity and immediacy of the live watch mode, I designed a secondary experience for curating the multiview streams. Any four of these streams could be selected by viewers using a modal stream-selection menu. Selected streams were then pinned to the top bar in the watch experience for one-click viewing.

UX Design & Development

Putting the freemium in premium

As a premium experience, it was a given that Command Center needed to be access-managed. However, as a new and unique esports viewing experience, Command Center also needed low-friction ways for prospective customers to experience the value it could offer and update their expectations before paying.

I designed experiences for a "Free Weekend" upsell, where Command Center was available to everyone for a limited time, and a "Window Shopping" upsell, where viewers without the Pass could enter Command Center and see what it offered but couldn't access restricted streams. This also included ad experiences in Command Center for non-Passholders.

UX Design & Development

Simplifying a multi-platform run-of-show

One of the key challenges in implementing Command Center was coordinating live event production with Blizzard. In order to offer viewers a simple, powerful way to watch what they wanted, we needed to connect two essential but totally independent systems -- the event production center which supplied the streams, and the Overwatch League creator channel on Twitch.

The Overwatch League production team provided the video streams from the live event, but Twitch channel pages were not engineered to support multiple stream keys that would allow them to ingest and present multiple video streams. We needed to build this capability and a creator UX to support it.

On the viewer side of Command Center, each stream required accurate metadata describing the player, player role, and team that was being shown on-stream. There was nothing inherent to a video stream that conveyed this information in data. The same substream (distinguished by stream key) would show multiple players from multiple teams over the course of a match day.

I worked with a dedicated engineering team to design and build a content management system for multi-stream esports broadcasts in Twitch's creator dashboard. This system was specifically designed to allow broadcast teams to preconfigure players, roles, and teams, and queue lineups for match-by-match changes quickly and easily, even in a chaotic run-of-show environment.

“Overwatch League’s Command Center on Twitch is good — great, even.”

- Polygon

Results

Command Center set a new standard for esports broadcasts

The Command Center saw robust adoption via the All-Access Pass within the first week of competition, and adoption continued to spike around free-trial events for the rest of the season. Enthusiastic feedback on social media confirmed that, as expected, player POVs were Command Center's killer app. Later in 2019, esports orgs such as ESL and GenVid adopted Command Center for premium tournament broadcasts of Counter-Strike, another FPS esport.

However, the 2019 Overwatch League season was marked by the emergence of a conservative Tank- and Support-focused strategy referred to as "GOATS.” The most exciting players from Season I were known for making plays on aggressive heroes, but GOATS strategies forced those players into Tank or Support roles that made their POVs less interesting and the game as a whole less entertaining to watch.

Over the course of the season, this style of gameplay depressed adoption of Command Center. Viewers who were paying for player POVs needed the game and its competitive meta to create an state of play in which star players can shine.

Customer Reactions