OGN drops Overwatch Apex tournament after Contenders league snub

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APEX season five will not happen as planned.

OGN, founder and broadcaster of the prestigious Overwatch Apex tournament, has cancelled season five of the competition and will not be involved with Contenders Korea, one of the development leagues for the Overwatch League.

OGN's statement suggests that it had planned to run another iteration of the Apex league before it switched to Overwatch Contenders. However, Blizzard appears to have picked another broadcaster for the Contenders league, and therefore OGN has cancelled season five of Apex. 

"We did our best and agreed to most of Blizzard’s conditions on continuing the competition, but we were notified that Blizzard was preparing a competition with another broadcast. Until that notification, OGN had been preparing for the next season, so we are very regretful," it said in a statement to Inven Global (it never mentions Contenders Korea by name, but that must be what it's referring to).

OGN said it "acknowledges Blizzard as a very important partner. We will continue to have a good relationship with them in the eSports scene and we respect and accept their decision."

The broadcaster for Contenders Korea has not yet been confirmed, but reports in December suggested that Blizzard would select South Korean broadcaster MBC.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.