Recently Blizzard and Twitch came to an agreement in which the Overwatch League would be broadcasted on the platform. This decision proved to be a huge success, racking up over 10 million viewers in its first week. Now it seems like ESL wants the same thing, except that with Facebook.The company has recently announced a new deal with Facebook in which the social media platform will be the exclusive platform in which Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Pro League and ESL One’s DotA 2 and CS:GO tournament series. This means that if you wanted to catch any of these tournaments, you’ll have to tune into Facebook to check it out.
Note that the deal only covers those games and competitions, and does not seem to include the Intel Extreme Masters or the ESL Pro League. Speaking to Polygon, ESL’s senior vice president of media rights and distribution, Nik Adams said that the decision to go with Facebook was in the hopes of reaching a broader audience.
“We are moving out of the more endemic spaces and platforms where we solely catered to a core esports audience and open up more to a broader audience. Here we can grow ourselves and our audience a little bit more and maybe lower the barrier to entry to esports a little bit, and bring it to people who haven’t heard of esports before or might have interest but aren’t regular viewers of those core platforms.”
Filed in . Read more about Counter-strike, Dota 2, Esports and Facebook.