There is a direct correlation to how involved Blizzard is with their sports and how bad they are.
Starcraft went without their support and it was wildly successful, until they region locked.
WoW arena sucks ass to watch, but Race to World First is incredible, until Blizzard steps in to save Christmas.
Overwatch had a shot at being special, but GOATS made watching the games incredibly boring, they should have realized that after the first game and shut it down hard. COVID killed the rest of it.
OWL was so forced it felt too corporate and inorganic, just another cash grab.
Brood War flourished in South Korea and effectively became the country’s third national sport behind football and baseball. OG Blizzard were cool with seeing their game played like this. Their Activision overlords were the ones who sued the fuck out of the Korean Esports Association (KeSPA) over broadcasting rights.
StarCraft II had LAN support gutted out not due to piracy concerns, but to effectively prevent unlicensed esports. This and their legal dispute with KeSPA is largely why none of the big Proleague teams ended up playing the sequel until almost three years after release.
WCS killed the grassroots scene that developed around SC2 in the first two years of the game’s release. The exclusivity deals, existence in only three regions (Europe, NA and South Korea) broadcasting embargoes, and how quickly Blizzard forced the idea upon stakeholders in a swift attempt to copy Riot Games made Ongamenet nope out of the scene, caused irreversible damage to Major League Gaming as a brand and effectively bankrupted the North American Star League. Not to mention that until region locking was actually introduced three years later, no non-Korean player won a SC2 major tournament between 2013 and 2015. BlizzCon only had two non-Korean players qualify in 2013 (Naniwa) and 2015 (Lilbow) respectively during that time too.
Anybody who saw what happened with WCS could see the Overwatch League failing from a mile off.