UK eSports and 2014

Snoopeh from Evil Geniuses

The UK eSports scene has been lacking behind others for quite along time now. The UK has 3 players in the LCS (Snoopeh, Impaler, Fredy122), a couple of pro Starcraft players and the odd CS:GO team that could give top teams a run for their money. The UK doesn't have any permanent eSports venues but does have the eSports bar Meltdown. What I am trying to get at is that the UK scene has some kind of base but is no where near it's potential but things are looking up.

Even though the UK scene is small it does have one very good quality, its consistent. The Insomnia Gaming Festival is now on its 51st iteration and epic.LAN is now onto its twelve event. Insomnia's 48th event at the beginning of  2013 had a prize pool mere £2500 for the LoL tournament. Last week Multiplay (Company behind Insomnia) announced that Razer will be sponsoring LoL at all 3 of this years Insomnia events with the largest guaranteed prize pool being £7500 and it will grow with more teams that enter. Its not only the prize pool that are increasing but also the event has had so much demand that they are moving to a new larger venue.

epic.LAN has also been growing with putting more cash prize tournaments with each successive LAN. For a LAN that holds only 400 people and having 4 tournament big cash prizes is very impressive. With the reappearance of ESL UK last year, they haven't been slow of the mark. They are holding a Dota 2 competition with £3000 with 2 sets of online qualifiers. ESL UK have also built a purpose built studio for casting of online events.

UK wasn't really on the international map for eSports until around last year in July when I looked on the back of a magazine and see an advert for Gfinity. Gfinity was a invitational tournament where players from came from all around the world came to London to compete for $55,000 in both LoL and CoD. Since then G2 (the second Gfinity) was only CoD, had an amazing prize pool of $70,000 and saw Twitch number improve. Also have partnered up with MLG and have been doing some qualifiers for the CoD championship. G3 is going to be even bigger with more games involved and will still be in the UK.

Perilous Gaming Rift winning i50

Sponsors are taking note of UK events. epic.LAN the LAN with only 400 people has attracted sponsorship from InWin and more notably Astro Gaming who have provided around £1400 worth of prizes to the LoL tournament at epic.TWELVE. Multiplay have now partnered up with Razer for the last 3 and the next 3 Insomnia events. Multiplay have also partnered with big brands like Mad Catz, AMD and tteSports plus the sponsors for most of i51's events haven't been announced yet.

Hopefully 2014 will bring bigger and  better tournament action from the UK scene. For the UK scene to grow it won't happen over night but with some high quality events with large amount of teams we might just see something happen.

If you want to attended an event this year check out Insomnia Gaming Festival and epic.LAN. Don't forget ESL UK do lots of tournaments and ladders.