Blizzard signs 2-year esports exclusivity streaming deal with Twitch

On Tuesday, Blizzard signed a deal with Twitch. For two years, Twitch holds the exclusive right to live stream several of Blizzard’s flagship esports competitions. A long list of these events includes the StarCraft 2 World Championship Series, Hearthstone Championship Tour, Heroes Global Championship, World of Warcraft Arena Championship, and Overwatch APEX League.

This partnership is already bringing some pretty useful stuff around for fans of Blizzard esports. In addition to the Golden Loot Box perk for Twitch Prime members we wrote about earlier, some of the Blizzard esports now have a schedule for official upcoming events posted to their directory page. Here’s a link to the new Overwatch directory, for instance. It needs a bit more organization, but it’s easy enough to mark your calendar for Saturday’s European Overwatch Contenders competition.

As someone who’s been following Blizzard esports for a while I’m pretty excited by this new partnership. At this point, Twitch has proved itself time and again as the most stable, user-friendly platform Blizzard has used. Seeing Heroes of the Dorm on ESPN was thrilling, but as a part of a paid cable service in few countries it restricted the potential for growth. The tech issues present with this past year’s partnership with Facebook Live made the same event unwatchable, sometimes literally. However, I did note that no collegiate events, including Dorm, were included in the list given by Blizzard in the press release.