Like many branches of entertainment, esports are often beholden to the whim of corporate interests. Sponsors will have specific demands, to remind the audience that the brand is present in that game. In one community, Overwatch, this branding is taking on increasingly more space. One of the casters for the Overwatch League, Salome Soe Gschwind-Penski, adorned themselves for a photoshoot, surrounded by chips, as seen on Twitter.

The scene has the caster decked out in a regal dress, sitting atop a mountain of Cheez-It boxes, like a shot from the Game of Thrones series. There are also some cans of Pringles chips strewn about, for contrast. The pictures fully embrace the snacks' influence, going from simply sitting on top of boxes, to consuming the product. It's not all corporate reverence, however; there are also a few cats there.

These pictures are reminiscent of a similar event in gaming. In 2012, Geoff Keighley unknowingly ignited a powder keg that took aim at the integrity of the biggest figures in the industry. Keighley, sitting next to bottles of Mountain Dew and bags of Doritos chips, was part of a promotional event for Halo 4. The brazen display of consumer products next to pundits caused a controversy that quickly dubbed Keighley as Doritos Pope, heralding the good word of junk food to gamers. In 2012, a host even just being in the vicinity of a copious amount of product placement was seen as scandalous. In 2020, the Overwatch League is quite literally eating it up.

Cheez-It Grooves, the specific sponsor, has been a prominent part of the esports broadcasts for a while now. At the start of the season, the mandated breakaway sessions, to highlight the snacks, would interfere with vital gameplay from matches, cutting out important plays to display a promo shot instead. So, instead of watching a team win a fight, the feed would cut to just a static shot of the Cheez-It Grooves logo. This innocuous error luckily led to the sponsor getting amicably mocked from there on out.

More recently, however, corporate interests have gotten more insidious. Recently, one of the teams on the roster, Guangzhou Charge, signed a deal with Herbalife, a company that sells suspicious supplements. Herbalife is banned in several countries, due to links with liver failure that may have been fatal for some. Additionally, the supplements are sold as a system that resembles a pyramid scheme model, now referred to as multilevel marketing or MLM. Fans and Overwatch League viewers were quick to voice their discomfort with Herbalife's presence as a sponsor.

Overwatch League has a lot of sponsors. With teams requiring multi-million buy-ins to participate, plus developer Blizzard mandating wage floors, the esports branch is an extremely expensive venture. As such, the business decisions being made in the league have been increasingly skewed towards a bottom line first, with community interest second. Some of the companies that have been involved in the league include Toyota and State Farm, which have few ties with the game and always feel hollow when announced. Streaming rights have shifted from Twitch to YouTube Gaming, to much chagrin from fans, even prompting pro players to ask for the return to the original platform. Twitch is not only where Overwatch lives as a game, it's also where the majority of pros are streaming.

In just eight years, we've shifted from seeing product placement in itself as sordid, to gleefully welcoming blind consumerism in all its glory. As gaming grew as an industry, so did corporate interest, except the larger audience didn't come with heightened skepticism, but rather the opposite effect. Where we used to laugh at Doritos bags being part of games, we now welcome the literal throne of junk food in our midst. As such, the pictures were received with little to no negativity from the Overwatch community.
 

In the end, the photoshoot is likely a well-intended joke. It's not that serious, bro. With the global pandemic still keeping the giant enterprise of the Overwatch League at home, people are left bored in their house, looking for outlets. Consumption certainly is one way we all enjoy passing the time if only to forget about a deadly virus or flagrant police brutality.

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed
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