Alibaba Spends $15m for eSports Tournament in China

Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company issued it will launch eSports tournament in China this year. The company signed a partnership deal with YuZoo, the Singaporean social networking company. Both agreed that under their $15.4 million-worth partnership  deal, they will produce Alibaba eSports events in China.

The two companies planning to launch about 1200 eSports tournaments throughout China. The plans including a eSports tournament series called the AliSports World Electronic Sport Games (WESG).

The agreement involves that AliSports pay YuuZoo to organize and run the World Electronic Sports Games. Moreover, Yuuzoo will guide the eSports Clubs Competition Center of AliSports’.

AliSports is the popular sports media venture of Alibaba, which was created in 2015. The main reason of the setup was to establish an online platform which could be a member of the professional sport gaming industry.

The predicted starting date of the new project is April 2016 and finals would be held in Shanghai around December. The involved games are Dota 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Star Craft 2: Legacy of the Void and Hearthstone.

Each titles would provide quite promising prize pools, around $5.5 million which implies the possibility of huge participant rate. The mentioned prizes of World Electronic Sports Games made the project for Counter Strike:Global Offensive the most high paying tournament.

The initiation is expected to be popular in China, where over 100 million eSports fans and about 440 million gamesters are waiting for Alibaba’s big event.

The World Electronic Sports Games

The World Electronic Sports Games Inc. was  founded back in 2004 by Paul Chong. The first three games were held in South Korea in 2005, but one year later the tournament moved to Hangzhou, Eastern China. On that occasion the whole game was renamed as the World e-Sports Games Masters. The inaugural World e-Sports Games took place in 2005 between January 30 through March 20. The featured games were Counter-Strike and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. In terms of participants, eight Counter-Strike teams and sixteen WarCraft III players took part.

High Expectations About the eSports Tournament in China

As the CEO of AliSports Daniel Zhang expressed, the aim of the company is to connect sport and technology in order to improve the quality of life. He also stretched in a report published on THE STACK, that sport is a “multibillion dollar business” in China and it has a strong potential for growing. The global revenue of eSports will reach $2 billion by 2018, which indicates that eSports is a massively growing sector.

So stay tuned, since April is here and this is not an April’s Fool. We will inform you soon about the most specified details of the tournament. So before you got too excited, read our online betting guide about how to bet on eSports.