One of the longest standing and most prestigious tournaments in eSports has quietly shut its doors. The World Cyber Games, designed as a sort of Olympics equivalent for eSports, will no longer be running any tournaments and is not holding the annual WCG final going forward.
It’ll be a while before eSports ever gets the credit it deserves from the mainstream establishment but that doesn’t mean that it already isn’t a massive industry. The recently held Dreamhack Winter 2013 had over 20,000 visitors on-site, almost 8 million unique views of the live streams, a near half-a-million dollar prize pool and a live performance by Darude.
For this and more neat info about Dreamhack Winter 2013, we have a handy infographic for your perusal.
(more…)
While I was watching last weekend’s StarCraft II regional finals with tens of thousands of other people, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people were watching the biggest even in the history of eSports.
DOTA 2’s world championship, The International, saw the win and a $1.43 million first-place prize go to Alliance after an epic winner-takes-all match to close out the best of 5 final.
If you’re a fan of the North American StarCraft II scene, now might be a good time to worry. Yesterday, Major League Gaming co-founder and CEO Sundance DiGiovanni tweeted that MLG’s November championship event in Columbus will not include a StarCraft II tournament.
As a result of this move by MLG, there are no major SC2 LAN tournaments held in North America.
Whether by design or whether it was unintentional, there will be some competition for your eSports attention during the second weekend of August. Blizzard’s StarCraft II World Championship Series Season 2 regional finals will be held on the same weekend of the Dota 2 world championship The International.
How do we know that competitive gaming is a bit of a big thing now? PBS made a brief documentary about eSports. It looks at the growth of competitive gaming from small events in arcades to massive events watched live by thousands of fans and streamed online by hundreds of thousands more.
et geekera 