The recently announced China E-sports Open, which kicks off on the 25th this month, has now revealed which teams that will be fighting for the €36,000 cash prize in Beijing.
Ten teams have been invited to the highly anticipated tournament. Among them we find the reigning WC3L champions SK Gaming along with the home sides of World Elite, wNv and Colorful. Judging from the list below, there's no question that there'll be a whole lot of skillful players attending the event in Beijing, China.
List of participants
World Elite Team Colorful
wNv Teamwork SK Gaming
Mousesports MYM Dreamteam
fnatic Team Wicked E-Sports
Beijing E-sports Team Gravitas Gaming
In an interview with Min "Yammi" Yang, CESO Director of Public Relations, the Chinese government's involvement in the project and in E-sports in general is, among other things, discussed. Here's an interesting snippet from the interview:
Esports in China has gained more and more support and attention from government especially the sports bureau. Back in year end of 2003, esports was officially confirmed as the 99th official sports in China by the sports bureau of Chinese government, which to some extent speeds up the development of the esports marketing standardization. According to the Olympic economy strategy, which is to improve the proportion of sports in GDP, the government has been giving great support to sports and the related industry. Therefore esports has been listed as one of the most important innovation projects. Bei Jing is aimed to be built up as one of the international sports cities. Great events to be held here are of course part of the projects while CESO is among the lists.
Links
GosuGamers.net - More info
fnatic.com - Interview with Yammi
myMYM.com - Soruce
