MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
The latest announcement for DreamHack’s ZOWIE Open series of tournaments in Bucharest confirms CS:GO is the headline tournament.
DreamHack Bucharest will take place September 16-18 in the same venue as last year’s event, the Polyvalent Hall, with a $100,000 prize pool for the final eight teams to fight over.
It is the seventh announced of eight planned events throughout this year to make up a circuit awarding more than $900,000 in prize money total.
This year’s announcement focuses solely on CS:GO, as many organisers are doing given the game’s continuing long-tail surge in popularity, though last year’s Bucharest Open also held Dota 2, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm tournaments too.
Hearthstone has now been confirmed to be on the running order too, with a $25,000 prize pool, more than twice last year’s $10,000 offering.
The 2015 event in April claimed to offer $110,000 as a base prize pool for CS:GO and include fan contributions from subscriptions to PGL’s Twitch channel to boost the total, however only $100,000 prize money was awarded, with $75,000 split among the top four teams.
In contrast, the Dota tournament at this event was originally billed as a $110,000 base pool, with community contributions, but in Bucharest it turned out to be a $80,000 base pool, increased to $134,424 with ticket sales and then boosted to $150,000 by the StarLadder tournament sponsors.
The move to slightly lower lump sums has been accompanied by an increase in Premier-level events throughout the year, however, which has helped to stabilise eSports as money continues to flow into the emerging industry.
