Davide Xu at Esports Insider reports that The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that the inaugural Olympic Esports Games will be postponed from 2025 to 2027.
Last year, the Olympic Esports Games were confirmed to take place in Saudi Arabia for the next 12 years (three Olympic cycles).
Initially set to take place in 2025, the Olympic Games were rumoured to be postponed to 2026 or 2027. According to a report from Sport Business, this was due to ongoing concerns about the format and a lack of details on key aspects of the programme by game publishers.
Aside from organisational and logistical aspects, there have also been hurdles in finding a suitable financial model, which is expected to be different from the traditional Olympic games.
As a longtime skeptic of the hard genre and audience divisions between sports and videogames, I’m thrilled at the legitimizing effect of incorporating esports into the Olympics. However, I recognize that esports come with unique challenges, largely spurred forward by capitalist interests. Nobody owns the rights to track-and-field events as a concept, but the legal rights and various corporate interests in broadcasting games like League of Legends (Riot Games) or Call of Duty (Activision Blizzard) or Street Fighter (Capcom) are tangled to say the least.
I’m not surprised the “logistical aspects” and “finding a suitable financial model” have been prohibitively complex.
