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. This is by far YouTube’s biggest move to capture a larger share of the Twitch-dominated streaming market since the launch of the now-defunct YouTube Gaming app.
Streaming and eSports have remained in flux as viewers, participants, and corporations continue to scrutinize their sustainability and growth potential. High viewership has made it clear they’re both here to stay, but considerable shifts in format and public eSports interest continues to alter each of these new forms of entertainment as they slowly settle in more snugly among better established media. However, as those transformations have hit and professional players keep hopping from one new hot title to the next, each industry has exposed themselves as vulnerable to the unpredictability of popular personalities like PewDiePie and PR disasters on an international scale occasionally stemming from the inherently corporate and expensive nature of crossing gaming with live broadcast.
A January 24th press release from Google confirmed their new partnership with Activision Blizzard, marking the beginning of “a multi-year strategic relationship to power new player experiences.” YouTube will now be the sole streaming platform for any and all leagues and events relating to Activision Blizzard’s expansive catalog of multiplayer titles, including Overwatch League, Hearthstone eSports, and the newly formed Call of Duty League. The other half of this monolithic deal will make Google Cloud the “preferred provider for Activision Blizzard’s game hosting infrastructure,” a move Activision Blizzard hopes will ensure “superior, low-latency player experiences” during competitions. Notably – yet entirely unsurprisingly – China is excluded from observing YouTube’s exclusive streaming rights.
As expenses rapidly grow for streamers, as is the case for players hoping to stay up-to-date with the latest Hearthstone cards and expansions, competitors and companies alike deal with huge sums of cash which will continue to change hands with more team-ups and acquisitions like this one. Of course, partnerships like Google and Activision Blizzard’s aren’t anything new, but their apparent necessity is swelling. Amazon’s Twitch has yet to be unseated from the viewership throne, but other corporate titans who want a piece of the pie aren’t giving in so easily. Microsoft will likely keep paying out extravagant contracts to bring the likes of Ninja and FaZe Ew0k to Mixer, and Google will gladly capitalize on Activision Blizzard’s desperation to replicate the extraordinary eSports success story Valve has found in The International tournament.
There are a lot of forces at play in the ever-changing streaming and eSports markets, so it may take quite a while to discover if this new partnership between Google and Activision Blizzard pan out. Its hopes of propelling viewership levels of the publisher’s games to that of the industry leaders may be a long-shot, but the extant mass appeal of YouTube coupled with the intense excitement surrounding upcoming titles like Overwatch 2 could bear astonishing results.
