IEM Katowice Confirmed For 2024 + DH Dallas

Republished By Plato

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TL.net ESPORTS

4 Posts

ESL have announced two new tournaments for the 2023/24 ESL Pro Tour: IEM Katowice 2024 and DreamHack Dallas (read official announcement).

IEM Katowice 2024 will be held over February 8-11 with a $500,000 total prize pool (the same as IEM Katowice 2023). The round-of-36 play-in stage has been removed, while the 24-player main event portion will return in the same familiar format. A combination of seeds and qualifiers will be used to decide the 24 main event players. Ticket sales for IEM Katowice’s StarCraft 2 tournament will open on Wednesday, Nov 15 3:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00).

ESL also announced that a major EPT tournament will be held at DreamHack Dallas during May 31-June 2, but did not reveal any additional details.

The official announcement also alludes to a subsequent “world championship” event after DreamHack Dallas.

The journey to the EPT World Championship will continue with an additional ESL SC2 Masters season concluding at DreamHack Dallas, taking place from May 31 to June 2.

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Balnazza

389 Posts

First of all: Great news and even better to have more clearance about the World Championships!

However, it is an odd choice (atleast for now) to split the Word Championships from Katowice again. On one hand it means more SC2 and more prizemoney, but with this new plan the actual EPT Finals will be so late, they basically cramped two years into one Tour. And those Tour finals will definetly have other seeding rules than before, since IEM Katowice alone will award the Top 4 with an invite and that third Masters in Dallas will also give out spots – and not to mention how potential new GSLs will fit into all of that.
Basically, the originally planned out “Tour Guide” is more or less obsolete now.

Lastly, I’m a bit afraid they will put the EPT Finals into that new Gamers8 event. That would be a huge downside to all of this

Nakajin

Canada8538 Posts

So we get Katowice + a separate world championship AND we get a confirmation of at least some kind of 2024 circuit?
That’s beyond my wildest dream, amazing stuff!

I do wonder what it means regarding the EPT, will the 2023-24 circuit still end at Kato or will it continue until next summer?

Edit: Oh yeah Saudi world championship… well shit

So looks like the real world championship tournament will be played in the Saudi Gamers8 thing. That fucking sucks, and i hate that the only reason that sc2 will be alive next year is some oil prince from a terrible country.

dbRic1203

Germany2598 Posts

I was wondering why there are no seeds from EPT points for Kato and if they are completly useless now.

It didn t even occur to me until the 3rd read, that Katowice isn t going to be the world championship.
As others pointed out allready, that probably means, the World championship will be decided at Gamers8 in Saudi Arabia.
Sux

yoshi245

United States2961 Posts

Hate to add to the derail train of how the oil money is basically going to take over and be the world championships it seems, but it’s not just esports after all. Other sports including MMA, boxing, and even portions of soccer are getting huge funding from oil money it seems. That and we know ESL is basically owned by oil money at this point anyway.

On the one hand I am glad that at least SC2 will survive a bit longer thanks to oil money going to the players, on the other hand we all know that that won’t last forever either. It’s all on the whims of the uber rich billionaire saudi prince or whoever deciding when to shut off the faucet or if humanity can find a way to make use of salt water as a perfect alternative to biofuels such as oil to put them out of business.

CicadaSC

United States723 Posts

Wait so qualifiers are in a month?

Gescom

Canada3168 Posts

Alive game confirmed

2024 let’s go

ZeroByte13

503 Posts

On November 11 2023 08:39 yoshi245 wrote:
Hate to add to the derail train of how the oil money is basically going to take over and be the world championships it seems, but it’s not just esports after all. Other sports including MMA, boxing, and even portions of soccer are getting huge funding from oil money it seems. That and we know ESL is basically owned by oil money at this point anyway.

In Dota 2, this year The International (official world championship) had 3m prize pool and Riyadh Masters (no DPC tour points at all) had 15m prize pool.
TI still has its prestige earned by being the biggest tournament by a huge margin in all e-sports for 10 years in a row – but for how long will it last?

In 2015-2022 The International had 20-40m prize pool and no other tournament had more than 3m, mostly 1m or less even for the biggest non-TI tourneys. Now Saudi’s tourney is 5x bigger in terms of money.

So yeah, it’s inevitable.

JimmyJRaynor

Canada15052 Posts

SC2 was created on the whims of Mike Morhaime. He was the only thing stopping Activision from turning Blizzard into a WoW expansion factory.