Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce site, has announced an eSports tournament for various game titles. The tournament will be helmed by Alibaba Sports Group (ASG) and Singaporean social networking firm, YuuZoo corporation.
The title of the eSports tournament series will be called the “AliSports World Electronic Sport Games”, WESG for short. The tournament will include Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void, as well as Hearthstone.
The tournament will commence in the month of April 2016 and will offer a base prize pool of USD$5.5 million across its initial four games. It is worth noting that the prize pool for each game still has room to grow via crowdfunding, which is similar to how Valve has been handling the prize pools for its Dota 2 tournaments.
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Apart from organising WESG, AliSports is also looking into organising other eSports tournaments using the company’s integrated AliSports Gaming Platform.
It’s great to see larger companies pushing eSports towards the limelight. With the introduction of the WESG tournament, not only will it increase the general audience for eSports, it will also raise awareness of the idea of professional gaming as a career.
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(Source: Medium via Inquirer.net)
