Today the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) made several major announcements regarding their tournament’s format and participation.
The first major announcement is that the ESWC will no longer support WarCraft III in its tournament. According to the news post:
Given the low international mobilisation around the game Warcraft III, both from the community and local tournament organisers, the organizing committee has decided to cancel the game’s presence in 2011. As a result, the Starcraft 2 tournament will be open to more participants and the organizing committee reserves the right to add a new game in the coming weeks.
The next major announcement deals with who is allowed to participate in this year’s ESWC. Currently, the ESWC is holding the qualifers for its World Finals (held at Paris Games Week, October 21-25) in 27 countries. While it’s awesome that the ESWC is branching out across the globe, there are still plenty of gamers who would love a chance to participate but there are unable due to the fact that there are no qualifers in their country. To give these unfortunate gamers a shot, the ESWC has released an application form that allows you to appeal to the organizing committee for a chance to play.
From August 25 to September 25, the organizing committee will review the applications and validate the participation of selected players according to sports criteria and international representation. Final registration has an admission fee which can be paid directly by the players’ or teams’ sponsors (200 $ per participant).
The last major announcement from the ESWC is that it will be giving away $200,000 in cash as prize money for the seven tournaments featured this year. The prize money distribution looks like:
For all the information on how to watch this year’s ESWC, click here.