Starcraft II - Esport UpdateBlizzard Entertainment|March 31, 2020

Starcraft II - Esport Update

As many of you are already well aware, our world is currently facing a truly frightening pandemic affecting hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. Many businesses and organizations are suffering aswell, and Starcraft 2 is no different.

Blizzard and Dreamhack are collaborating every day about the best course of action to take to minimize damage. Today, we want to share these steps with you.

Tournament rescheduled

We have already announced on the ESL Twitter that DreamHack Summer and DreamHack Dallas will be postponed :

DreamHack Summer, originally planned for June 12-14, will now take place on August 6-9 at Elmia in Jönköping, Sweden.

DreamHack Dallas, originally planned for May 22-24, will now take place on August 14-16 at Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Dallas.

The short gap between the two tournaments is not ideal for players and everyone else involved but it is the best we can do given the current situation.

New streaming platforms

For fans of GSL, it is already known that their favorite tournament will not be available on Twitch in 2020. The reason behind this choice is of financial nature and was pushed by the competition between AfreecaTV and Twitch. Cooperation costs were too high to sustain in the economic crisis we live in. That is why we chose to switch GSL from Twitch over Youtube.

For the foreign side of Starcraft competition, we want to try something new. After the recent partnership of ESL and Facebook, DreamHacks are going to be broadcasted exclusively over Facebook Live. We look forward to experience all of the opportunies this could bring to our scene and are very thankful to Facebook for supporting Starcraft esports.

Blizzcon Announcement

A few months ago, we decided to change the title of World Champion from Blizzcon to Katowice. Today, we are really excited to announce what Blizzcon 2020 holds for Starcraft fans.

A big part of competition is dependent on new talents. We all enjoyed seeing our young players such as Reynor or Clem rising in skills and now, we want to encourage that even further.

50 % of the Blizzcon 2020 bracket will be reserved for unknown players ranging from Master 3 to Grandmaster, selected randomly. These players will have a chance to face of against top contenders. In order to make games a little bit more fair, top players will be playing at 50% life handicap against amateur players.

Hopefully, that decision will encourage new players to try out the competitive scene. This also allow us to make substantial economies by giving a couple hundreds of euros to 16 years old amateur players as a first place prize.

Epic Games acquisition

Partnerships really are key to survive the economical downturn brought upon us by COVID-19. This is why we want to announce the complete acquisition of Starcraft 2 by Epic Games, developers of Fortnite.

From now on, Epic Games will be in charge of game balance and futures game developments. It is not actually planned to rework the loved by many gameplay of Starcraft II but a complete overhaul of graphical and design assets is to be expected so that Starcraft correlate better with the deep Fortnite lore.

As a greedy company, we are very glad to finally give up one of our last game that is not a complete trashy cash-grab and we look forward to milking every cent of our future players while other companies will -hopefully- focus on making great games.