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.
While professional gamers might be ultra competitive and go for the throat in competition, they’re a great bunch when push comes to shove. The StarCraft community, including a number of star players, have come together to support HyuN (real name Ko Hyun) after his team, Quantic Gaming, failed to pay him $23,000 in salary.
The battle of the two best foreigners playing StarCraft II took place this weekend. Canadian Zerg Scarlett and Swedish Protoss Naniwa did battle in a special one-off best of seven series in a battle to determine who is the best non-Korean in SC2. In an epic back-and-forth series, it was Naniwa taking the win in six games, 4 to 2.
Perhaps a bigger story than the match itself was the prize pool. The series, billed as the highest paying show match in SC2 history, featured the first major prize entirely in Bitcoins. Thanks to sponsors, the prize pool was 14 BTC or about $8,400.
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.
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The beauty of sports is that anyone can win on any given weekend. That saying also extends to eSports. At this weekend’s StarCraft II World Championship Series Global Finals at BlizzCon, Korean Protoss sOs came in as the underdog 12th seed and beat four higher ranked players en route to winning the 2013 StarCraft World Championship.
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South Korean Protoss player Dear thought he had his GSTL Season 2 match against Symbol won after forcing Symbol’s zerg army to retreat. To celebrate, he busted out what are called “manner nexuses” which are Protoss buildings built to show off how much money the winning player had in reserve in defeating his opponent. It’s considered bad mannered in StarCraft 2
The only problem was that not only was Symbol not defeated but his army supply outnumbered Dear’s by nearly two-to-one when the manner nexuses were dropped. And with most of Dear’s money dropped into a show-off move, the result was inevitable.
A number of high-level competitive StarCraft II players have publicly stated that they haven’t been paid their prize from the finals of IGN Pro League 5 which took place last December.
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.
et geekera 