Overwatch League senior director of partnership Jon Spector may have been quite close-lipped about the teams’ venues and tournament dates after revealing next season’s homestand weekend structure yesterday, but some teams have already announced their homestand plans.
The Vancouver Titans have revealed that they’ll be competing in Rogers Arena, where they first announced the formation of the team. The large stadium is home to the Vancouver Canucks hockey team and holds up to 18,000 people.
While this season’s homestand weekends in Dallas and Atlanta sold out, the venues were much smaller. Dallas Fuel used the Allen Event Center, which holds a little over 8,000 people. The Atlanta Reign’s stadium of choice only fit 2,750 fans.
The New York Excelsior also gave some news to fans. The New York City team took to Twitter to tell OWL viewers that they would be hosting two homestand events next season. The teams that would take part in these tournaments are the Toronto Defiant, London Spitfire, Paris Eternal, and Boston Uprising, which make up the North Atlantic division of the 2020 Overwatch League.
“Are you ready?” NYXL tweeted, adding that the team was already “hype.”
The Toronto Defiant also confirmed that they would be hosting two homestand weekends. OverActive Media Group CEO Chris Overholt told ESTNN that live engagement is a big part of building fan affinity and emotional connections between viewers and their brand.
“This is a logical step and a logical growth for the league, and it should put us at a place where we can really start to test some assumptions that we’ve seen from our research and start to think about how we can not only grow the audience of Toronto Defiant but how we grow the audience of esports in Toronto and Canada,” Overholt said.
Both teams have yet to announce a venue.
On the South Atlantic side of things, Washington Justice said they’ll be hosting five homestands, while the Philadelphia Fusion will host three. Justice told The Game Haus that they have narrowed the venues down to Anthem and the Entertainmnt and Sports Arena, which hold around 3,000 and 4,000 people respectively.
The Dallas Fuel also boasted five homestand weekends, which will see the West Pacific division teams competing in a yet-to-be-named arena in Dallas. The San Francisco Shock also announced two homestand weekends of their own to be held in the Bay Area in 2020. No specific venues were announced.
For the West Pacific division, Guangzhou Charge will have five homestands according to the Washington Post. The team has yet to state this for themselves. The other Chinese and Korean teams have also been very quiet about the 2020 season’s homestand schedule.
