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Leagues and Governing Bodies

Partners pitching Olympic-style esports tournament

Amid the eye-popping arms race for prize money in esports, an international joint venture is building a counter-intuitive property called the eGames: an Olympic-style, nation-on-nation tournament with nothing on the line but medals and pride.

International eGames Group, a partnership of Playbook, web platform World Gaming and the International Group, a British real estate developer, are touring the U.S. this month to pitch to potential sponsors and other partners.

No cash prizes will be a hard sell to the world’s best gamers, some of whom clear seven figures in annual income. But the group’s CEO, Chester King, thinks the primary focus on prize money in esports is a long-term liability — the same thing, in his estimation, that tempered the poker craze in the 2000s.

In order to thrive, he said, any sport needs a cultural, altruistic element alongside the business. He’s betting many sponsors agree.

“Wayne Rooney plays for millions of pounds, but Manchester United also encourages him to play for nothing in the World Cup,” King said. “You’ve got to have the money, but you also have to have events for national pride.”

Organizers want the eGames to run concurrently with the Olympics in each Olympic host city every two years, though it has no ties with the International Olympic Committee.

They hope to include 16 countries for an event in Pyeongchang in 2018 and grow to 32 for the 2020 Tokyo Games, competing in up to 30 different video game titles. They piloted the concept with an eight-team tournament in a single game, “Super Smash Bros,” at the U.K. hospitality house in Rio but otherwise have not determined additional titles pending licensing deals with publishers.

Teams would be formed via national qualification tournaments in the preceding odd-numbered years. The 2018 U.S. qualifiers, for instance, would play out online in the first quarter of 2017 and culminate in a ticketed event finals in the last quarter of 2017.

Planning and selling for that tournament is part of the agenda for King’s U.S. tour, which will overlap with the ESL One tournament at Barclays Center, Oct. 1-2.

“Now we’re just connecting natural synergistic dots,” said Reed Bergman, founder and CEO of Playbook. “So while yes, revenue generation on the sponsorship side is part of what Playbook is involved in, we’re also connecting major power players throughout sports business with our product.”

The tournaments are owned by the nonprofit International eGames Committee, with extensive promotional help from the U.K. government. IEG is its for-profit marketing and promotional arm. M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment’s new esports division picked up the eGames as its first client, and CSM and Fuse are also advising.

King is better known as a leader of the family-run International Group, which owns the iconic Stoke Park golf club (the setting for James Bond’s match with Goldfinger) and builds hospitals and luxury properties.

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