Most Overwatch League fans know Jon Spector from his regular cameos in the league’s video updates, where he wields a whiteboard full of plans and a faux “script” of plot twists to spice up the season.

In reality, he’s been working with an extensive team of experts as the league’s vice president, organizing this year’s grand finale and rolling toward the April 2022 start date of season five, confirmed to be played on an early build of Overwatch 2.  .

Ahead of the Overwatch League season playoffs, which begin on Sept.

I remain really proud of the team for this, but we had two or three weeks, not even, to rebuild an entire plan for the 2020 season in the middle of things.

This year, the team had a proper offseason to do all of the planning work for 2021 and that meant being able to do all the stuff that I think has shown every single day in the show this year, like updating the overall tone of the league, refreshing our broadcast graphics, and making sure that the desk looked great. .

Our tentpole moments with tournaments this year are literally almost double the viewership that we had last year.

When you look at the types of ways partners would want to activate, a lot of it is often [related to] a live audience or the signage at the big arena and we’re not going to have those types of opportunities this year, anyway.

Our focus for playoffs and finals has just been how to close out the season in as strong of a way as possible, drive hopefully our best viewership of the year, and put on a great show for fans all over the world, but doing that in a way that is safe and compliant. .

It’s been a ton of work over the last couple of months, in particular, with our partners on the development team, trying to assemble what I’ll describe as “an incredibly complicated puzzle.” Any time that you’re going to transition something from Overwatch to the early build of Overwatch 2, that’s complicated by itself, but we’re also dealing with the newly resurgent pandemic and trying to put together a plan given continued uncertainty about what travel and immigration and some of the kind of key elements of a season plan are going to look like. .

I think, in hindsight, that probably [caused] some of the bad games of telephone that led to what I would call “misreporting” from some folks about the Overwatch League 2022 season.

We’ve spent the last several months really working toward the moment we just announced yesterday, where at Grand Finals we’re going to have the chance to show off a pro player match in five-vs-five on one of the new Push maps.

[Next week], once each team is eliminated from the playoffs, we’re going to have a setup at the University of Hawaii where they’ll be able to start playtesting some of the five-vs-five experience.