Esports like CS:GO and Dota 2 appeared and developed in two main regions, namely Europe and North America. But from there they quickly spread to other parts of the world and reached a lot of people, simply because their mechanics and tournaments are incredibly appealing to young people.
For 2019, the well known tournament organizer DreamHack has announced a festival for South America. This festival will include a CS:GO tournament that will be held in Rio de Janeiro and represents just one of the 10 different CS:GO events that have been planned for next year by DreamHack alone.
© DreamHack
Tomas Lyckedal, DreamHack’s Chief Strategy Officer, said in a recent inteview that approximately 300.000 fans attended the company’s events in 2018. That’s certainly a lot of people but it’s just a drop in esports’ ocean of hundreds of millions of enhusiasts.
The potential for growth is still huge and capitalizing on it is only a matter of marketing, production value and time. If people enjoy the events and are aware of when the next one will be organized, they will often take their friends and travel to that location, as long as it’s not too far away. In that sense, esports has become a reason to take a 3-day trip to some city you’ve never seen before. And who will say no to an adventure if they can afford it?
This Rio de Janeiro festival will be the first one organized by DreamHack in South America. The company aims to put together a great spectacle in Parque Olimpico, where a bring your own computer gaming expo will take place as part of the festival, as well as a CS:GO tournament with a prize pool of $100.000. The prize money isn’t very high but the event will almost certainly still attract a lot of great teams, simply because Brazil is a massive country with a huge passion for CS:GO. So there are many fans to be won over by participating and getting a top result.
In particular, I fully expect MIBR (Made in Brazil) and Team Liquid (because of TACO) to be directly invited at the tournament, but everything is still to be decided.
DreamHack’s announcement came on a very special day for the company. Believe it or not, DreamHack’s been around for 24 years. Let me think: where was I in 1994? Oh, yes. In kindergarten. And I was still some years away from playing Half-Life and then Counter-Strike. Good times.
Anyway, with this announcement, DreamHack will probably force a number of other tournament organizers to show some of their hand for 2019. Ten different events is absolutely amazing and I’m expecting the big players to show esports fans that they too have big plans and great tournaments for them in the year to come.
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