GomTV Launches Global StarCraft 2 League; $500,000 in Prizes for 2010 and Plans for 2011
During the remainder of 2010, GomTV will run a monthly tournament with the first one beginning on August 28 with preliminaries to determine who will participate in the 64-man tournament. One of the biggest challenges facing GomTV and Blizzard is getting the StarCraft: Brood War professional players over to StarCraft 2. To do that, some serious prize money is being put up for winners. It is undetermined how much money is being contributed by Blizzard; regardless, the money should attract some great players:
- 2010 GSL Monthly Prize Pool
- Winner: 100,000,000 KRW (aprox. $85,700 USD)
- Runner-Up: 30,000,000 KRW (aprox. $25,700 USD)
- Semi-Finalists: 10,000,000 KRW (aprox. $8,600 USD)
- Quarter-Finalists: 4,000,000 KRW (aprox. $3,400 USD)
- Round of 16: 2,000,000 KRW (aprox. $1710 USD)
- Round of 32: 500,000 KRW (aprox. $430 USD)
- Round of 64: 300,000 KRW (aprox. $260 USD)
- GSL (January, March, April, July and September) - Main Event - 32 Code S players tournament and 64 Code A players tournament.
- World Championship (June, and October) - 16 player tournament comprised of top-4 from each region.
- Ladder Tournament (February, May, August, and November) - Top 200 from each Battle.net Ladder play in a preliminary to determine participants in a 16-man double elimination tournament.
- Blizzard Cup (December) - Top 8 (undetermined) best-of-five tournament to determine the best player of the year.
It was GomTV's leagues with English commentary that helped me develop my admitted StarCraft obsession and I'm extremely excited to have over a year of pro-play queued up for broadcast with StarCraft 2.
Back in May, Blizzard signed an exclusive broadcasting deal with GomTV for the rights to all Blizzard games, essentially shutting down the existing Korean eSports Players Association (KeSPA) and StarCraft: Brood War leagues run by OnGameNet and MBCGame. The deal was the result of three years of failed talks between Blizzard and KeSPA over IP rights. OnGameNet and MBCGame are free to negotiate licensing deals with GomTV if they wish to continue broadcasting Blizzard games.
In America, Major League Gaming has added StarCraft 2 to its 2010 line-up with the first tournament kicking off in Raleigh, NC at the end of August. MLG is the official US partner for StarCraft 2.
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SuperDanielMan has been pretty vocal about this tournament on his twitter for the last couple of days actually, so I don't know if he's coming back to cast this. Tasteless has been dropping hints left and right, so I think we can definitely say that he's going to do it.
read SDM's twitter here, http://twitter.com/superdanielman. -