Report: MLG walks away from StarCraft II WCS hosting contract

Major League Gaming will no longer host Blizzard’s North American StarCraft II World Championship Series.

PCGamesN reports MLG has backed out of its agreement with the developer, and at least one man in the know believes it’s because of a lack of support from Blizzard.

After coordinating on WCS America Season 1 and careful consideration, we have decided to transition away from operation of WCS America and refocus efforts on producing our own eSports competitions,” the organization stated.

It was a pleasure working with Blizzard on the inaugural season, however given the structure of the relationship and the impact on the organization, players and community, we feel that it will better serve the eSports ecosystem to run tournaments independently”

Former professional StarCraft broadcaster and industry personality John ‘Total Biscuit’ Bain took to Reddit to elaborate on the move – explaining that the event was a burden as much as it was a blessing for MLG.

What most people aren’t going to grasp is how good it is for MLG. The preconception is that WCS is a bag of money on a plate to any organization that gets it and holy shit is that completely inaccurate. WCS is a massive resource drain on any organization that hosts it,” Bain said.

Blizzard do not in fact give you all the money you could ever need to run the event and MLG was put in a ridiculously difficult position to recoup costs because they had to host at an EU-unfriendly time. So you lock out your biggest audience by default and are then expected to recoup via sponsorship and ad revenue? What?”

The amount of money MLG had to spend with no possibility of return to run WCS was outrageous.”