September 14th, 2007

World Series of Video Games cancelled

Playerzblog is starting to look more and more like an obituary but such is the world of today, where honest hardworking gamers see their dreams of glory and international fame crushed with little explanation. Games Media Properties announced the impossibility to support its World Series of Video Games (WSVG) events in the current format. WSVG is a major international professional electronic sports competition. Unlike last year’s E3 collapse which marked the end of an era in gaming exhibitions, the WSVG will not be toned down to size into a new setup, but instead will cease to exist. Thus the remaining tournaments scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on October 18-21, London on November 16-18 and Sweden on November 29 – December 2 have been cancelled. The organizers assure everybody that Los Angeles refunds will be available and all past WSVG winners will receive their prizes as soon as possible. From now on, Games Media Properties will instead focus on promoting their online advertising network of sites, allegedly reaching seven million users each month.

The WSVG was born two years ago as a joined effort of the Cyberathlete Professional League and Intel, its prime sponsor. Six events were organized in 2006 and things were looking good for the coming year, hosting competitions and designating world champions for Counter-Strike, Quake 4, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, Project Gotham Racing 3, Halo 2 and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. Champions were made and broke here, giving the gaming scene something to look forward as regional qualifiers occurred all over the world on a regular basis.

Unfortunately it all stirred up this summer, when four events were held in just three short months, apparently not yielding enough revenues to sustain the league. For such a cataclysmic end to occur, Intel must have pulled out its support. The word on the net is that Guitar Hero got more coverage on TV during the WSVG, and that’s a definite no-no since it’s a Microsoft product, namely the competition. It’s still unclear if it was just a bad investment choice or something more sinister, as financial problems have been invoked without being singled out, along with the difficulty of finding proper venues for such massive events. As a side note, the dreamers of the gaming scene already began devising a plot to resurrect similar contests and expand the competition to online games. Ming has an idea about having a World of Warcraft Arena world series instituted and he writes it on GameRiot, a fabled Games Media Properties run website.