The tournament titles have been announced for the upcoming Intel Extreme Masters season. The major news from this announcement is that Quake Live has not made the cut. The new and immensely popular game, League of Legends has been awarded a tournament spot instead. No explanation has been provided for the decision not to utilise Quake Live on the circuit.
League of Legends is to make its first appearance as a main title in the 2011-12 season. It had been used at the Hannover Invitational event in March, and was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Unsurprisingly, Counter-Strike 1.6 and Starcraft 2 will also take prominence within the season. Both titles have been extremely successful in recent Intel Extreme Masters events.
The decision to drop Quake Live was met with mixed responses on Twitter and the comments section of the Intel Extreme Masters news piece. The Quake series is thought of fondly by many within eSports, but numbers do not lie; Quake Live had been struggling to pull anywhere near the same level of interest as some other competitive titles. There is no indication if enough public outcry will cause a change of mind. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen if there are enough passionate voices within the Quake community and beyond to justify such a change.
I will let Brother Mack do the talking for me.
Weird choices are being made, but really couldn't care less actually :D
I'm curious to see if id software will finally start upgrading the game, making the updates that have been expected for a long time by all the oldschool players.
Also, if anyone cares about tournament prizes in general, take a look at this: www.playquake.com/columns/2011/06/prizes/
(Check out which organization has the most "unpaid prizes"!)
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They've had this planned for a while..
If dreamhack hadn't had 250,000 viewers then they wouldn't have swapped and dropped, but imagine out of 250,000 possibly more paying for a HD stream, $$$$.