Alluding to some sort of issues with Blizzard, Major League Gaming has decided to end its connection with the World Championship Series (WCS) America. They will finish out the WCS America Season 1, through to the end of Challenger League and Up/Down matches.
MLG made the following statement on their website:
After coordinating on WCS America Season 1 and careful consideration, we have decided to transition away from operation of WCS America and refocus efforts on producing our own eSports competitions. It was a pleasure working with Blizzard on the inaugural season, however given the structure of the relationship and the impact on the organization, players and community, we feel that it will better serve the eSports ecosystem to run tournaments independently.
It appears that hosting the WCS is not the money-maker people assume it to be. TotalBiscuit, StarCraft shoutcaster explained on Reddit
This is a good thing for an awful lot of reasons, but I think what most people aren’t going to grasp is how good it is for MLG. The preconception is that WCS is a bag of money on a plate to any organization that gets it and holy shit is that completely inaccurate. WCS is a massive resource drain on any organization that hosts it. Blizzard do not in fact give you all the money you could ever need to run the event and MLG was put in a ridiculously difficult position to recoup costs because they had to host at an EU-unfriendly time.
I suppose this frees up MLG to do more of their own tournaments. I wonder what new partnerships we can expect in the future. What would you like to see from MLG going forward?
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Last Updated: June 20, 2013
Jakster
June 20, 2013 at 15:09
Who in SA cares about cheeseburger Ermmerica???
Zoe
June 20, 2013 at 17:33
Who knows, just thought it might be the start of an interesting trend. First they stop hosting in the US, what might the next step be?
That Tall Twit
June 20, 2013 at 15:49
Header win.