Much has been said in the past about the possibility of Esports being part of competitions such as the Olympic Games. While it is actually still missing from the main Olympics event, we can soon have a taste of how it would be.
The International Olympic Committee allied with tech giants Intel to prepare Rocket League and Street Fighter V tournaments. These are competitions that will take place before the initial Tokyo 2020 Olympics event.
According to information from the Esports Observer, this competition will be called the Intel World Open and will be tournaments made in collaboration with Psyonix and Capcom, responsible for Rocket League and Street Fighter V, respectively.
They will hold both of these tournaments from July 22 to July 24, 2020 at the Zepp DiverCity, a venue located in Tokyo, Japan. Each of them will offer a great prize pool for $250,000.
In case you are one of those interested in taking part in these tournaments, you should know that there will first be online qualifiers in which the players of each country will have the opportunity to fight to win a place in their national team.
Those players who are chosen will take part in a live qualification event that will take place in Poland in June 2020. As you can imagine, it will be in Poland where they decide which teams will compete in the tournament to be held in Tokyo.
Of course, Intel’s role in these tournaments will be responsible for the production of both tournaments. This is because they have extensive experience in events such as Intel Extreme Masters.
Intel’s director of business development for games and Esports, Mark Subotnick, also made the below statements.
This is a new tournament, and it’s meant to celebrate our values—being open and welcoming to anyone, in alignment with the Olympics. There really is no better host country for us to kick this off in than Japan. It’s the first place for the Intel World Open and it has an extremely rich history in gaming. We’re honored to be able to add to the bright future of esports in Japan. Producing this as a large-scale global event, it requires a lot of commitment, a lot of collaboration, and a lot of partners. We’re lucky enough to have two amazing partners for 2020.
When we’re working with the IOC and working on something like the Intel World Open, we’re really looking for the broadest audience and the most accessibility, and these two titles really lead well for that,” said Subotnick. “These two titles are something that the average consumer or audience member can look at and get what’s going on, and that’s unfortunately not always the case in esports. So that makes a lot of sense to work with these two partners.
Esports is a sport that is quickly growing across the world. If these pre-Olympic tournaments are successful, it could mean that they will add it as an official sport in the next Olympic event after Tokyo.
There is still a lot of people in our world that does not see Esports as an actual sport, but hopefully with the attention it will receive with the Olympics, maybe they will realize what a massive industry Esports really is.
