Players watching Heroes of the Storm’s Americas Championship via Twitch.tv will qualify for Blizzard’s new promotion: the “Storm Watcher” portrait.
This is the first step in Blizzard’s new initiative: connecting Battle.net and Twitch profiles so players can watch and comment on the live streams logged to both their Twitch and in-game accounts.
In order to claim your portrait, you first need to link your Battle.net account through your Twitch.tv settings page. After that’s done, just make sure to tune in to the Americas Championship, taking place Sept. 19 & 20, while logged with your Battle.net account, and starting October, the reward will be added to all “Storm Watchers” in-game portrait collections.
According to the original post on Battle.net blog, all regions are eligible for this promotion (this also means you can watch any competition, not just your region’s) and you can use any device; you just need both accounts linked and to be logged in while watching the stream.
Bizzard’s interest in joining with the giant streaming platform is a no-brainer – Twicth.tv has served as the main eSports stream central for quite some time, already hosting a plethora of streams (with millions of viewers) for competitions in League of Legends, DotA, CS: GO, etc. Seeing the threat of YouTube Gaming lurking, this could be Twitcht’s first block in cementing itself as -the- place for eSports professionals and enthusiasts.
Can we hope this becomes a trend?
Blizzard’s post tell us they are “considering rolling out similar promotions for our other games”, and factoring Twitch’s popularity with DotA, CS: GO and Starcraft players, these could very well be the next step in their team-up.
Speculating a bit, it’s likely these promotions, if continued, will be limited to aesthetical bonuses rather than items or your selected game’s currency in order to incentive the playerbase without jeopardising it. It’s still an interesting strategy that other companies could copy in the future (League of Watchers skins, anyone?).
But for now, make sure your profiles are linked before tuning to the HotS Americas Championship this week!