An official from Valve has officially announced that Counter Strike: Global Offensive’s next major championship will be held in Cologne with a prize of $250,000.
This is the sixth consecutive championship, and will be held in the LANXESS arena in Cologne, Germany, running August 20-23. 16 teams (8 qualified, 8 invited) will be pitted against one another head-to-head to try to take the title of current holders Fnatic, who won the previous ESL One Katowice 2015 Championship.
Because of the popularity of eSports online, fans who cannot attend Germany’s largest indoor arena should not worry about being unable to watch. All of the group stages and playoff matches will be streamed for viewers around the world. Furthermore, multiple livestreams showing “out of game” and behind the scenes footage will be available. Also, regional qualifiers in Cologne, Germany, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Burbank, USA will be officially streamed for the first time on July 18-19,
ESL are now clearly committed to CS:GO as an eSport after their previous major event, ESL One Katowice 2015, broke records, drawing over one million concurrent viewers for the Grand Finals. A previous Counter-Strike: Global Offensive ESL tournament drew three million unique views, signifying the development of eSports as they are simply becoming more and more popular amongst fans.
Speaking to IGN, Managing Director of Pro Gaming at ESL Ulrich Schulze said “after CS:GO surpassed one million concurrent viewers at ESL One Katowice, we intend to raise the bar even higher with ESL One Cologne” (accounting for the newly-streamed qualifiers and extra content). He added “by bringing teams from all over the world to the largest indoor arena in Germany, we are confident to make it the biggest and best CS:GO even ever hosted.”
eSports fans can get further details on ESL’s next CS:GO championship by heading to their website, where they can also buy tickets to the event.