WSVG Brings WoW To Esports

Hmmm...massive multiplayer roleplaying online esports game?

WSVG announces one of their games for the upcoming year will be World of Warcraft 3v3 arena battles (best of 5 - via Amped). Interesting choice, but so are the others on their list: Q4, Guitar Hero? and Friday Night Round 3 (a boxing game) as primary games with $750 K in prizes. I suppose they are really differentiating themselves in the somewhat crowded esports scene. This announcement comes hot on the heels of MLG's PR on their $1 million prize structure for Halo2 and Rainbow 6.

In fact along with the olympics of esports, the WCG, and the newcomer CGS, there's actually not a lot of overlap in the games selected. Is saturation about to hit? How many video game tournaments and different games can the public actually support?

eSports Update

What's going on in the world of eSports lately?

Not a lot really. Many shakeups in the major clans as they realign themselves for the DirecTV Championship Gaming Series.

GamingJunky asked where are the major tournaments awhile back? That post and this one on VideoGamesBlogger list most of the events for 2007.

Announcements from WSVG (World Series of Video Games) and WCG (World Cyber Games) about their tournament schedule followed (via ESreality and GotFrag). Expect more announcements from the other events soon.

Major League Gaming also announces a TV deal.

Global Gaming asks if eSports is even spectator worthy? If people can watch poker, cricket, bowling, and darts, then I say yes, if it's done right.

A Few Interesting Tidbits

This post will just be a collection of items that may or may not be newsworthy:

1. PS3 to allow users to record gameplay footage. Look for a massive tidal wave of console-based machinima. Let me guess, they can only upload to Sony's proprietary website?
2. IBM to use Second Life to host town hall meeting about spending large sums of money on new business incubators. Is SL going to be the place to have new PR events? Will the White House Press Room move into SL?
3. Oh yah, the World Cyber Games finished in Italy (the olympics of video game tournaments). It sounds like it was poorly organized. Surprise winners of the CS touranment were Pentagram from Poland while Korea took the overall championship (and the US did very poorly). It looks like there was very poor media coverage at this event, which is a shame. Perhaps the upcoming CPL Winter event will actually be watchable on the web (without having to use Half Life TV?). Sponsors need to start pressing these organizations hard for some sort of decent media coverage otherwise what's the point of sponsorship.

New Quake 3 Trickjumping Video

I noticed on Esreality that Shaolin Productions had released their new movie. Entitled Unity, it is another trickjumping movie for Quake 3 and showcases a set of tricks created by 27 different players. As always, it is nicely done and edited, and there is even a high definition version (I used VideoLAN to watch the non-HD version).

It seems to me, and I thought of this when I saw my first trickjumping movie, is that this would be a perfect esport for the next CPL or WCG. It requires skill, it's fun to watch, and it would be fairly easy to judge. You could do something similar to how the Xgames are done with skateboarding and BMX tricking. Give players (singles, pairs, quads) a short period of time to do a series of tricks on a single map, and then judge them (or open it to American Idol-type audience participation). On the bonus side, it's not really violent, which might help in the overall PR game with the idiotic congressional types who rail against the evil of video games.

Are there any trickjumping competitions? Any prizes given out? How many trickjumpers are there anyways? Are there leagues? Or is this whole thing at the eve of something bigger like skateboarding or surfing was so many years ago?