Erik DoA Lonnquist · @ggDoA
6th Jan 2020 from TwitLonger
Toss a Coin to your Caster
Greetings fellow gamers,
After a lot of thought I’ve decided to move away from a full-time role at the Overwatch League in 2020 and explore other opportunities in gaming. It’s been a fantastic experience working with my fellow casters, big brain desk people, and the incredible staff at the Blizzard arena over the last two years, but due to some of the League’s decisions over the last year in terms of creative direction, management, and resistance to input from veteran esports personal, I felt it was time for a change. Like I’ve mentioned before, I still absolutely believe in what OWL is trying to do in the space. Keep in mind that I’ve been part of this since it was a PowerPoint file on a laptop. OWL’s goals are unprecedented and it’s better for everyone in esports if it succeeds. I’m not totally writing off being involved with Overwatch and OWL in the future and maybe I’ll see you at a Homestand or two this year. At any rate, I wish nothing but the absolute best for my former co-workers, the teams, the players, and the new blood coming into the League and hope that 2020 is a great year for Overwatch.
Special thanks to Nate Nanzer for giving me the opportunity to be part of building this thing. It’s been a wild ride, but I think we’ve all learned quite a bit. Special thanks as well to the Overwatch Team at Blizzard for making me feel extraordinarily welcome in the office when I visited. In particular, thanks to Jeff Kaplan and Scott Mercer and always being willing to talk in depth about game design and the future of Overwatch and thanks to Marisa Palumbo for being a friend since day 1 and helping make a lot of that happen! I sincerely hope we get to have a lot more chats in the future!
By far the most difficult part of this transition is the end of Christopher “Montecristo” Mykles’ and my seven-year casting partnership. It’s hard to find the words to describe the monumental esports journey we shared. Monte’s like a brother to me and it’s tough to accept that we won’t be arguing about various facets of nerd-dom together on broadcasts every week anymore. We’ll still make time to do some content together for sure! It just won’t be as regular as it used to be. Did you know we got scolded for mentioning Froot Loops on a DisneyXD channel broadcast? Apparently, you’re only supposed to mention healthy food on channels marketed to kids. I mean… It has fruit in the name!
Anyway…
I’m entering my 10th year of professional esports casting this year and that’s significant to me. Early on in my career I decided that everything I do needs to be directed at driving the industry we love so much forward. Wherever I can do that the best, that’s where I want to be. Right now, the best thing I feel I can do is go back to the basics: work in as many games as I can and help out as many broadcasts as I can. I’ve decided that until another enticing full-time position comes along, I’m going to be going full freelance. Esports mercenary. That means getting a chance to go back to games I loved in the past like League of Legends and Hearthstone and also hopefully getting to work more with a lot of new titles like TFT. (yeah I know it’s sort of LoL, but bear with me!) There’s a lot of great competitive gaming out there!
I’ve also completely fallen in love with miniature painting and table-top gaming and will hopefully have more time this year to make some content in that realm as well.
Thank you all so much for following my work over the last nine years! One of the hardest things about this move will be missing out on meeting a lot of you this year! Career-wise I still feel like I’m just getting started and I can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store for all of us in the competitive gaming scene. What amazing things will the cyber athletes show us? What incredible sights will we witness? Time will tell. For now, though…
Toss a coin to your Caster…
Oh, he will cast your league….