Good news, nerds. The Olympic Council of Asia has announced that esports – or competitive gaming – will become an actual medal sport for the first time ever at the 2022 Asian Games.
An esports demo event will make an appearance at next year’s Asian Games in Indonesia as a kind of test run before the official run in Hangzhou, China in 2022.
Furthermore, an esports event will be previewed at the next Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games. So far, only FIFA 2017 is confirmed, but will also include an online battle arena game like League of Legends, and an RTS game like StarCraft.
To put all of this in perspective, the Asian Games is second in size to the Olympics, with 10,000 athletes taking part in the latest event in 2014. It’s a multi-sport competition similar to the Pan-American Games.
It’s a pretty big deal for competitive gaming, which has only recently seen a rise in popularity in Australia, but has been around in various forms since the 70s. In South Korea, esports is fucking massive, filling out stadiums for competitive prize pools worth millions of dollars.
Will the emerging sport make it all the way to the Olympics? Probably. Skateboarding and sport climbing are going to be at the 2020 games, so we can’t be too far away from esports slotting itself in there.
We had a chat to an esports team a little while ago to get their perspective on the Australian scene and how it’s growing. Check it out below.
Source: Kotaku.
Photo: sportingnews.com.