Valve has laid $250,000 on the table for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players.
The next CS:GO tournament takes place from Mar. 12 to Mar. 15 at the Spodek Arena in Katowice, Poland, and the large prize fund from the developer will make for a competitive event. It will see 16 teams playing the first-person shooter in front of a live crowd and a large online audience. The last CS:GO tournament — DreamHack Winter 2014 in Sweden — had more than 500,000 viewers for the Electronic Sports League’s (ESL) live online coverage.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1649309,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"A"}']The popularity of e-sports is growing at a staggering rate, and CS:GO’s popularity is growing along with it. Released back in 2012, CS:GO player numbers increased by more than 250 percent last year, and content creators made over $3.5 million selling maps and items for the game. Its team-based approach and lack of respawning make it a perfect fit for competitive e-sports, and Valve is keen to keep pushing its value.
Eight of the teams competing in Poland will be the quarter finalists from DreamHack 2014, and they’ll be joined by eight teams chosen through upcoming qualifiers. Valve is funding the qualifying event, which will take place offline for the first time.
Rob Pardo, the former lead designer of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, recently sparked a debate about the value of e-sports when he told the BBC they should be part of the Olympic Games.
“There’s a very good argument for e-sports being in the Olympics,” he said. “I think the way that you look at e-sports is that it’s a very competitive skillset, and you look at these professional gamers and the reflexes are lightning quick, and they’re having to make very quick decisions on-the-fly.”
He did concede that the popular view of sport requiring a great deal of physical exertion may hold this idea back, however: “If you want to define sport as something that takes a lot of physical exertion, then it’s hard to argue that video games should be a sport, but at the same time, when I’m looking at things that are already in the Olympics, I start questioning the definition.”