It’s the year of Counter-Strike. The game’s latest iteration is quickly becoming one of the hottest esport around. With over 1 million viewers at March’s ESL One tournament, and a brand new league just around the corner, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is making leaps and bounds over other games in terms of viewership and participation. In Northern Europe, though, it might make the biggest jump yet—to broadcast television.
QPAD’s King of Nordic tournament, which launched yesterday, is a competition between four countries: Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway. Each week, teams will participate in qualifiers to determine who gets to play in King of Nordic, then those representative teams have a four-way battle to crown the winner.
The team that wins takes home $500 and prizes, and with a total prize pool of $6,000, the tournament is bound to attract some of the region’s top players. The real prize, however, is the bragging rights, as QPAD has more ambitious goals than simply begin a run-of-the-mill regional tournament.
Right, King of Nordic is broadcast on Twitch every week, casted by Rikard “The Swede” Franzen and Chris “Yankman” Schetter of TGBF.tv fame. But Schetter told the Daily Dot that QPAD is currently negotiating with several television channels regarding their content. “It’s quite possible this [tournament] ends up on TV in a few Nordic countries,” he added.
If it succeeds, King of Nordic would join a select few tournaments to make it to airwaves. Just last weekend, Blizzard’s Heroes of the Dorm Grand Finals ran on ESPN2.
Photo via zoonabar/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)
