Biggest annual eSports events
Every year this sports is growing exponentially, the evolution of eSports is a story in itself but fast forward almost 50 years and we have a full-on calendar of massive annual events to look forward to. While the Covid-19 pandemic has decimated the sporting calendar, eSports can just move online and keep going and push even further into the mainstream.
Pro Evolution Soccer – eFootball.Pro Finals
The eFootball.Open, previously known as PESLeague has been run since 2003 as a European only event, the format was changed in 2010 for global participation. The event is to FIFA Soccer as what Pepsi is to Coca Cola and in 2019 it has added the name eFootball to its title clearly looking to steal a march on FIFA and capture this market. The eFootball.Open is an individual event and French man Walid “usmakabyle” Teban was the 2019 champion.
The “eFootball.Pro” tournament will see the best professional players wear the colours of their football clubs competing against other top eFootball teams to determine the No.1 eSports football team. The regular league season is taking place between December 2019 and April 2020 with the finals due to take place in July. Brazil are the reigning champions.
The Fortnite World Cup
The first Fortnight World Cup is now an annual after after the inaugural events taking place July 26–28, 2019 at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing, New York.
Since Fortnights launch in 2017 it has become the most successful free-to-play game ever. It’s viewership figures on Youtube are enormous and so is the prize pool! The 2019 Fortnite World Cup was among the biggest eSports events of 2019 and had a $30m prize pool with 2.3m people watching the event live.
With 19,000 attending the event last year, this is now one of the biggest sSports events in the World. However due to current circumstances (COVID-19 pandemic) the 2020 Fortnight World Cup which is due to take place 24th – 28th July, may just be an online event.
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League of Legends World Championship
The League of Legends World Championship is the annual professional League of Legends world championship tournament hosted by Riot Games. The 2018 finals were watched by an incredible 99.6 million people, a record for eSports. 2019 went one better, the World Championship brought in more than 100 million viewers, including a peak of 44 million concurrent viewers, during the competition’s final round on November 10th.
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The International (DOTA 2)
Photo Credit – Flickr
The International is an annual eSports world championship tournament for Dota 2, run since 2011 and hosted and produced by the game’s developer, Valve.
Defense of the Ancients (or DOTA) is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game for the Blizzard Entertainment video game Warcraft III.
The International is the flagship tournament for DOTA 2 and 10th international in August will take place this year in the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, Sweden. With crowdfunding, the community generated a price fund of $34 million last year with last place taking home $85,000 and the winner getting a whopping $15 million at the event held in Shanghai.
Call of Duty World League (CWL)
Call of Duty World League is an annual tournament held to decide the world champions for the game. The tournament is organised by Activision Publishing, the game’s developer and has been run as an annual event since 2016.
The qualifiers for CWL are January and the season will start sometime later this year.
16 teams competing for a prize of $6 million and since 2019 all regional restrictions have been removed to allow players from all over the world to easily compete in the tournaments. The players will participate in the games via PlayStation 4.
Capcom Cup
The Capcom Cup is the highlight of the fighting eSports calendar and it features some of the world’s best players and is focused on the Street Fighter series. To even qualify for this event you need to be ranked in the top 26 in the world by entering some of the other big eSports events such as the DreamHack Masters and the EVO Championship. The prize fund for this event was $250,00 last year.
The event has been run since 2013 and run from April – June. Capcom Cup, has cut four tournaments from its roster and postponed two more because of coronavirus concerns this year.
International eSports Federation (IeSF) World Championships
IeSF is one of the main governing bodies of eSports, the equivalent of say, the IAAF for World Athletics, and this World Championships will include DOTA, eFootball Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) 2020 and Tekken 7 as the chosen games.
The games will take place in Eilat in Israel in December and will be the 12th anniversary of the World Championships and is regarded as the jewel in the crown of World eSports.
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