Blizz asking for $20 million franchise fee for OWL

they'll only get 31/32 teams, GBs owners wont fork money over for that

Well for Blizzard's previous e-sports accomplishments:
They killed the Warcraft 3 scene, stopped all patching/balancing once SC2 development was underway despite all pro's giving numerous complaints and feedback on how to create more diversity in the game(It just ended up being same units/builds every time).
They killed Brood War (Wanted direct control over Kespa which is the Korean organization that bred and ran the scene, forced OGN to give SC2 prime time slots over BW and have BW matches broadcast afterwards, forced Kespa + any Broodwar tournament organizations to also host SC2 tournies with larger prize pools making all BW teams and pros switch over to SC2).
They did their best to kill the SC2 korean scene (Created a WCS system barring Koreans from participating in North American or European tournaments unless they were citizens of a country in those continents except for a couple of special Global events run by Blizzard. They said the reason for this was that Korean's were too good and had an unfair advantage over the rest of the world since they had established pro teams from Starcraft Broodwar and wanted homegrown North American talent to prosper more. This caused almost all the Korean pro teams to disband as there wasn't enough money in their scene anymore.

So those are a few of Blizzard's e-sports credentials. Now with OWL it looks like there is a pattern emerging - they always want full control for themselves, they substantially prefer homegrown North American talent to the rest of the world, and they want the majority of the money being made from the scene to go back to their pockets. It doesn't look good though I'll still have my fingers crossed that it somehow ends up succeeding.