After dealing with Fusang's matter, Boss Jia threw everything to Natsume Haruko. He rushed back to China because the second WCG was about to start.
Time flew by, and in the blink of an eye, a year had passed. It was time for the WCG to start again.
The second WCG competition, starting from the qualifiers, was much more intense.
It was different from last year. In the first WCG last year, other than Pokemon, which had been officially held for an entire year, and the contestants had been selected, the rest of the competitions were all temporary qualifiers.
A public invitation letter was published in the newspaper, and then players from all over the world who were interested in participating in the competition could go to the designated location to participate in the qualifiers. In the end, the strongest players would be selected to participate in the main competition. That was the general process.
However, smart people could see that this kind of competition was actually very unrepresentative.
First of all, there might be a group of expert players who saw the competition invitation, but because they didn't have money to pay for transportation, or because they didn't have a visa at all, they couldn't go to other countries to participate in the qualifiers.
Not to mention that there were many experts who didn't even see the news.
Anyway, after the first WCG competition was held, many experts were angry. They said on the Internet that they could also participate, and they could even win the championship.
In short, this kind of competition was a bit one-sided, and it couldn't filter out all the experts.
However, the second WCG competition was much more formal.
First of all, other than Pokemon, all the other seven main competitions of the first WCG competition had their own qualifiers in the world.
A part of it was paid by Daqian Games, and it was held in 32 different cities in 12 countries around the world. In the end, the qualifications to participate in the WCG were determined based on the points and rankings of some major international competitions. This guaranteed that most players in the world would have the opportunity to participate in the competition.
If you didn't participate in a competition that you could participate in by train, then don't blame others for not being representative.
Of course, countries like Africa didn't have any qualifiers at all. After all, these countries probably didn't even have a decent gaming console.
Among the eight games, there were three that didn't even require the Daqian to pay for. Many organizations from all over the world rushed to register and organize competitions in their own countries. The Daqian Games only needed to organize an international competition.
The three games were Red Alert, Diablo, and Crazyracing Kartrider.
Among them, the Red Alert was even more popular than the Pokemon League. There were organizations in 14 countries all over the world that took the initiative to organize national level competitions.
In addition, there were organizations from 28 countries that held city-level competitions. Red Alert also established an independent gaming association. It was the second game after Pokemon to have its own independent gaming association.
Of course, these independent gaming associations were all subsidiaries of the World E-Sports Federation. It was only because there were too many participants and competitions that they needed to be managed separately.
In addition to the eight competitions in the first WCG, there were four additional competitions in the second WCG. They were StarCraft, Counter Strike, Live Soccer, and Need for Speed.
StarCraft was a game released in the second half of last year, while Counter Strike was a game released in early 1997. They were both Daqian Games' games.
However, Live Soccer and Need for Speed were different. Live Soccer was a game under Konami, while Need for Speed was a game produced by EA in the United States. These were the two biggest highlights of the second WCG. In the second WCG, it was the first time that a non-Daqian game competition had appeared.
Although these two games had a bumpy journey to join the WCG, after the E3 last year, Konami and EA announced that they would help two and three of their games establish professional e-sports competitions and then enter the WCG.
However, Konami had to cut one of their games because of the huge cost of organizing the competition. Only Live Soccer was left.
As for EA, other than Need for Speed, there were very few spectators for the other two games. Although they forcibly held a national competition, it was not approved by the International E-Sports Federation. In the end, they gave up, leaving only Need for Speed.
As for the specific journey to enter the WCG, it was very long.
First, in July and August, they registered their games and competitions with the International E-Sports Federation. At the same time, they requested to enter the WCG.
After that, according to the rules of the association, they had to compete in at least ten countries around the world, including the United States, Fusang, and Hua Xia, as well as one country in Europe and one country in South America.
They had to establish a pyramid of competitions, starting from city-level competitions, rising to national competitions, and then international competitions. There was also a requirement for the prize money, which was that the total prize money must not be less than 500,000 USD.
Just these competitions alone cost these two gaming companies millions of dollars. Among them, Konami had to give up on the Contra competition because of the huge expenditure.
The most important thing was the number of spectators. The association also had requirements for the number of spectators. That was, the total number of spectators for the entire series of competitions had to be at least one million.
Take EA for example. They were not short of money, but because the number of spectators for Madden Football and SimCity was less than 100,000, they could not meet the requirements of the International E-Sports Federation, so they had to give up.
This sounded like a trap. At first, Konami and EA were very unhappy with the International E-Sports Federation, as well as the controller behind it, Daqian Games.
However, they soon found out that the International E-Sports Federation's actions were actually very beneficial.
At this time, e-sports was still a new thing. Even in 2020, except for a few games like LOL, Dota2, and Overwatch, which had established a perfect competition mechanism, many other games were dead.
The reason was that there were too few spectators, and the commercial benefits and value of the games were not enough.
The International E-Sports Federation set such a standard, which was equivalent to helping them eliminate games that did not have a large audience and did not have enough commercial value.
The games that could meet the standard were, without exception, the best of the best.
For example, Live Soccer. With the holding of the competition, many football fans in the real world became spectators of Live Soccer.
Although the graphics of the game were a bit simple, only in the game could you see famous football players from Ying State, France, Germany, Brazil, and other countries gathered in a team to play football. You could even see interesting scenes like Pele tackling Pele's dribbling.
The same was true for Need for Speed. After all, the audience still liked to watch all kinds of thrilling racing performances.
The direct income generated by the competition alone exceeded 500,000 USD. Although it was still far from the cost of holding the competition, it was still an income.
At the same time, the indirect income generated by the competition was huge.
After the competition was held, the sales of Live Soccer increased by one million copies in three months, which made Konami nearly 5 million USD in profit, successfully making up for the cost of holding the competition.
The sales of Need for Speed increased by 1.5 million copies, and EA made even more money.
However, what made EA depressed was that because of the popularity of Live Soccer, the sales of his FIFA International Soccer had plummeted by 500,000 copies. Obviously, this wave of players had been snatched away by Live Soccer.
Therefore, it was said that EA had begun to prepare for a large-scale e-sports competition for FIFA International. They were ready to snatch back the players they had lost from Live Soccer.
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