Esports has a plethora of global competitions, from the Overwatch World Cup to the Counter-Strike Majors. However, the recently announced Esports World Cup will bring an entirely new competitive format to the industry with teams competing across multiple genres and titles.
The tournament will be hosted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and will take the place of the Gamers8 event that has been hosted in the city over the last 2 years. But will this have an effect on the Esports industry? And what are the major concerns surrounding the event?
Here’s everything we know so far about the Esports World Cup 2024!
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When will the tournament take place?
Unfortunately, all we know right now is the Esports World Cup will take place in “Summer 2024” and will run every year from now on. If you head to the website, it does say more information will be available at the end of 2023, so we’ll have to wait for more details from the tournament organisers around official dates.
As the event is taking the place of the Gamers8 tournament we can expect it to run at a similar time to that event. This would mean we could see the tournament running as early as the middle of July and ending at the start of September, giving us a 6-8 week window for teams to compete.
What Games are at the Esports World Cup?
We know which Genres will be available at the Esports World Cup, these include:
- Racing
- FPS (First Person Shooter)
- RTS (Real Time Strategy)
- TPS (Third Person Shooter)
- MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena)
- Battle Royale
- Fighting
- Sports
All these categories cover the most popular games in the world right now. It’s unclear whether it will be a singular title for each genre, but it’s likely we will have a few for each.
For example, in the Battle Royale genre, we are likely to see Fortnite, PUBG and Apex. It would be difficult to choose a single title here as they are all as popular as one another in different regions.
Another example here is “Sports”. We will definitely see Fifa (EAFC) at the World Cup, but its unclear whether other games such as NBA2K or Madden will be included as they are typically more popular in the US.
Who is playing at the Esports World Cup?
The Esports World Cup is taking a slightly less conventional route when it comes to a “World Cup” class competition.
Instead of Countries competing as whole nations in this World Cup, teams will compete to qualify, similar to other Esports competitions. It is also likely that we will see the biggest teams in the industry receive a direct invite as they will already have complete rosters for all these games.
We saw a similar situation at the Gamers8 tournament last year where some teams qualified through a separate tournament, and some teams such as Cloud9, ENCE, G2 and FaZe received a direct invite to the playoffs.
It will be interesting to see how the qualifiers/invitations are handled, but for now, we will have to wait for more information from the tournament organisers.
