On Wednesday, the International Olympics Committee announced that the Olympics will be holding an official Esports series this year. Qualifiers have already begun, and will culminate “in live, in-person finals…at the first ever Olympic Esports Week,” held in Singapore in late June.
The Olympics choosing to competitively legitimize a notorious pay-to-win sports game, especially in the company of enthusiast products like Zwift, Virtual Regatta, and Virtual Taekwondo, feels like an extremely odd decision.
Is it? It doesn’t seem like an odd decision to me, all said. Is it bad? Yeah, but it’s obvious to me why all of this is happening. It seems like everything between the lines here screams that this is a marketing event. Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and two of the games in this lineup are from a Singaporean company with a direct tie to the Global eSports Federation. I don’t know, I’m pretty disconnected from sporting in general but none of this seems out of character for an already sponsor-heavy industry introducing corporation-produced mediums into the mix.
Apparent corruption and self-dealing led to the selection of some extremely obscure video games as representatives of esports for the Olympics? Say it ain’t so!
