The coronavirus has, as all of you must know, been spreading like wildfire around the world. It has been responsible for the deaths of over 250,000 people and has crippled entire countries, not to mention the global economy. Until a cure is found and released, our best bet is to practice social distancing and attempt to stem the spread of the virus. Hence, many highly-popular events that involve physical attendance are being postponed or cancelled, and the gaming and E-Sports scene are most assuredly no exception.
Many sporting and E-Sports events have already been cancelled or postponed indefinitely. These include events like E3 2020 and TwitchCon. Numerous E-Sports tournaments like Dota 2 International, Apex Legends Global Series, League of Legends Championship Series, and many more have also been cancelled. Now, Epic Games has moved to cancel the Fortnite 2020 World Cup, which would have been one of the largest and most popular E-Sports events of the year
Epic Games announced the development in a series of tweets. “Due to the limitations of cross-region online competition, there will not be a Fortnite World Cup in 2020”, the developer stated. Server lags and connection issues are some of the problems that can spoil a real-time online game of Fortnite when featuring many different regions. Since Epic’s biggest worldwide gaming event could not be held at a single physical location, they cancelled it. No location or date for the World Cup was announced earlier, but it was reportedly scheduled for July 2020
The development, while disappointing, is not quite surprising, given that qualifiers for the World Cup should have already started, as they began in April last year. However, Epic Games says planning is already underway for the 2021 World Cup, which will hopefully take place without any hindrances. Epic wrote on Twitter: “We don’t know when a return to large, global, in-person events will be practical, but we’re hopeful to be able to put on some form of Fortnite World Cup in 2021.” Thankfully, they clarified that all other Fortnite competitions will be hosted online for the rest of the year. These include the Fortnite Champion Series (FNCS), regular Fortnite Cash Cups, all other third-party events, and broadcasts. Subsequently, the Fortnite fanbase can look forward to streaming these matches online. Fortnite players also have many in-game events and the launch of Chapter #2, Season #3 to look forward to.
The 2019 Fortnite World Cup was held in the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New
York City which seats 23,000, and over 2 million concurrent viewers watched
the finals live. Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf took home first place and the largest
share of the $30 million prize pool. All in all, it was a record-setting event in
many ways. While we are all disheartened after learning that such an event will
not be held this year, it is vital to assure that humanity prevails against
COVID-19, and we fully support such precautions.
