Sang-beom ‘Munchkin’ Byeon has just announced that he’s the most recent professional Overwatch player to retire from the title to pick up Valorant. The brain-drain is real within the Overwatch League as more and more players leave the title to try their hand in the first-person-shooter from Riot titled Valorant, and likely won’t be the last.
The Overwatch League isn’t the only title suffering right now as more players continue to flock to Valorant in an effort to be part of the grassroots competitive scene; Counter-Strike has suffered recently as well as multiple players opt to shoot their shot in a new title, instead of maintaining older ‘tried-and-true’ staples of the industry.
Munchkin’s traversal over to Valorant makes sense, however; this isn’t the bizarre shift that we saw from Jay ‘Sinatraa’ Won.
Munchkin was locked in the Contenders league until he was picked up by the Seoul Dynasty for the inaugural season of Overwatch League. He stayed with the team until 2019, which found him relegated back to Contenders on the team Lucky Future.
Having already taken his shot at Overwatch League and lost to newer talent, it’s difficult to ascertain precisely why he didn’t make the transfer earlier unless he wanted to remain with the team through the May Major in Contenders, where Lucky Future was relegated to 7/8th place.
Munchkin was a DPS primary with a signature hitscan playstyle that saw him frequent heroes such as Tracer, McCree, and Widowmaker before retiring from the league.
This is unlikely to be the final exodus from the league; the season will inevitably end later this year after the finals, marking the close of a difficult and beleaguered period within the Overwatch League, and Blizzard as a whole that has been punctuated by Hong Kong, BLM, and the current pandemic of COVID-19.
DPS players, as a whole, have noted more than once that they’re tired of riding benches into obscurity as they wait for a meta to come around that allows them to flex their competence, and the role lock has only done so much in ensuring that all specialties get some time of the metaphorical (as it currently stands) stage.
Multiple teams still have many DPS players on their bench that are likely to want to spend their time on a stage, playing regularly for teams and fans that appreciate them.
Precisely what, if anything, Blizzard plans to do to stem this loss of talent has yet to be seen, but it needs to be done soon.