Cadred has laid its hands on a leaked letter to partners of the World Cyber Games that has confirmed the organisation will no longer be running traditional games tournaments and only supporting mobile phone games.
The news will come as a major shock to e-sports fans the world over and will also be a massive blow to games such as Counter-Strike 1.6 who have been supported continually by the event, which in its heyday was seen as the biggest e-sports event on the globe.
The motivation for it seems to be financial and it was clear that the games that were generating the most money in recent years were mobile phone titles, given their increasing presence on the ticket.
The letter, signed by Brad Lee, the CEO of WCG, read:
In recent years, the gaming and IT trends have been moving so fast. In the current status of gaming and IT industry, one of the most remarkable information to us was the mobile shipments have exceeded the PC shipments.
As wide spread mobile devices, mobile gamer would rapidly increase as well. In this situation, the major PC game publishers have been expanding their investment and business in the mobile game development & publishing.
This information was very cruel to us since we had been committed to the PC-Based gaming event for long time. We have witnessed that there have been many companies and organizations who went out of business because they didn't put effort to change. Therefore we concluded that we should create WCG's new identity.
Under this circumstance, we made a hard decision that we should bring the mobile, new key sector in the game industry, in our event concept. Hence, WCG decided to start the Mobile Game-Based Festival.
To create the Mobile Game-Based Festival, WCG is under the discussion with the sponsors and game publishers regarding new event structure and the countries for new festival. Therefore, there will be no longer present event module, such as Pan Championship, and PC-Based National Finals. And, the official game titles of WCG will consist of mobile games.
We'll be bringing you more in way of reaction to this massive story as we have it.
Iunno, there were (and are) some beast USA CS1.6 teams. 3D comes to mind (although I think it's now defunct )
3D and EG weren't bad, but they still didn't really win anything afaik.
It's hard when you have LIONS, fnatic and SK all living in the same country (Sweden) when they are all top 6. So cutting out two of those...
Quote:
Originally Posted by neon
It serves a purpose though, like the Olympics of gaming, get behind your country!
but yeah.
It also gives the smaller countries a chance of competing, but there are other things like.
Do you know how much it costs to buy the rights to run a WCG?
I can't believe it, srsly how competitive can a mobile phone game be anyway?
Makes little-to-no sense if you ask me, serious gamers (with serious skill) will play serious games...
I think they may find it difficult to attract the same numbers for their events if mobile games are gonna be the staple...Who wants to sit around watching some dud play Animal Farm anyway...
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The Zerg formerly known as [TA]Ridiculisk.500
TAhackdZ.379
Considering this is one of the only gateways for us to get to international tournaments i think this is terribly sad. I feel WCG was very important for us.
As for the concept, i think it's an awesome concept as it gives gamers a chance to cheer for their country, and I'm fairly sure parts of a team can be from else where if they band together to qualify at the same event.
In terms of multiple good teams from the same country, in cs in particular they usually had 2 sweden teams anyway, and for sc2 there was 2 korean players as well werent there? But yeh this is completely retarded even for WCG lol
im skeptical the letter is true but not THAT skeptical.
wcg loses money every year, as do ESCW, MLG, etc they are all funded by venture capital or other support. the only reason why WCG still runs is due to financial backing from samsung. if you remember a step in this direction last year was when the asphalt (made by samsung) mobile game had a 50k prize pool, i believe sc2 was only at 30k.
A switch would make "business sense" as well as promote their samsung phones heavily since they have monopoly and can choose what games they want to have in WCG and people who want to play will be forced to buy samsung phones. or if apple wants their games in wcg i imagine they have to pay heaps of $$$ rights to have their games in as official WCG titles. with the explosion of the iphone / android market this just seems like a calculated business strategy, and as you know, the #1 goal for businesses is to make money.
So yea imo 65% this letter might be BS and the other 35% of me is open to the possibility of it being real also partly because the site which posted it is huge so theres no need to make up a story to get hits and its decision for samsung that makes business sense, but sadly at the expense of the gaming world.
i certainty hope theres no "dont support samsung anymore" threads like what happen with grubby when steelseries pulled out. samsung's wcg was an amazing event for many years, especially in the earlier ones.
In terms of multiple good teams from the same country, in cs in particular they usually had 2 sweden teams anyway, and for sc2 there was 2 korean players as well werent there? But yeh this is completely retarded even for WCG lol
"he's only got one bird left, can he do it? ...he loads at takes aim... and we see the red bird flying toward his destination, hitting the pig head on! amazing play!"
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