eSports

The world elite of eSports is already in Madrid

The city hosts on May 10 and 11 up to 6,000 attendees at Blast Pro Series, the CS: GO electronic sports championship.

“It all started when I was a child and my parents brought the first computer home. My older brother started playing Counter Strike and I joined. My classmates also had fun with electronic games and when I fought them, I was the best. When I was about 10 years old, a friend of my brother asked me: Peter, do you want to live on video games when you grow up? I said of course, it would be great, but that's impossible. ” The story is told by Peter Rasmussen, better known as Dupreeh. Play in the Danish team Astralis, the number one electronic sport CS: GO worldwide. Since signing its first contract in 2013, Dupreeh has entered a million and a half dollars (1.3 million euros)

Now he is in Madrid, together with the rest of the team's players, to participate in a new edition of Blast Pro Series, a championship that will take place on May 10 and 11 at the Madrid Arena Pavilion, awarded 250,000 euros . There are still tickets available that range from 27 to 89 euros. The capacity is 6,000 people although millions can follow it on Twitch (the platform to watch streaming videogames championships) from Blast, where millions of people followed the last edition, held at the end of March in São Paulo, Brazil.

eSports, the sport that will fill the future

Thousands of fans are still live in Katowice for three weeks two of the main European video game competitions.

The Polish term spodek can be translated in Spanish as "saucer." This is how the multi-purpose stadium under cover of the Polish city of Katowice is known because, they say, it looks like a spaceship. Opened in 1971, it is the largest of its kind in Poland. Over the past three weeks, some 11,000 fans have filled to burst the Spodek every day to attend two of the main European eSports competitions: the ESL One and the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM), a video game championship that concluded yesterday and that This year he has distributed nearly two million euros in prizes and in which professional teams from more than 30 countries have participated. The organizers sold more than 150,000 tickets for the event in an industrial city that does not exceed 300,000 inhabitants.

Together with the attendees at the stadium, millions of video game followers followed tournaments via streaming platforms, usually in combat or strategy titles such as CS: GO, Dota 2 and Starcraft 2.

Olympic video games?

In its quest for younger audiences, the IOC comes up with several meetings to the eSports industry, which aim to enter the 2028 Los Angeles Games program.

Thomas Bach, 64, Olympic gold in fencing in Montreal 1976, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), sat last July on the stage of the auditorium of the IOC museum in Lausanne with Jacob Lyon, aka Jake, 21, professional of the Overwatch video game. They got together to talk about their things: Bach, the Games; Jake, from elite video game competitions (eSports), and both, of what could be between those two worlds. Bach had presented the meeting as a "clash of cultures," and yet there they were, forging an understanding that aims to have video games included in the 2028 Los Angeles Games Olympic program.

After Lausanne, the IOC included eSports on the agenda of four high-level appointments until the end of 2018, including that of the IOC executive committee on December 1 in Tokyo. A convinced approach, but with caution.

During the talk with Jake, Bach was kind, but suspicious, especially with violent games (a "red line") and with the procedure. The IOC wants to set the pace and not feel overwhelmed. But there were reasons for them to sit together. Several were seen in the video presented by the forum: 165 million “enthusiasts” of eSports in 2018, 15.2% more than in 2017; 380 million global audience; 52 million euros in tickets for events; 100 million in prizes. The eSports live the effervescence of an explosion, while the Games look for baits for young audiences: in Tokyo 2020 the first Olympic champions in skateboarding, climbing, surfing and 3x3 basketball will be seen.