The European finals of Blizzard's StarCraft 2 World Championship series will be hosted in Stockholm Globe Arena - the national indoor arena of Sweden, on September 15-16. DreamHack, event host partner of Blizzard and long-time eSport mogul in Sweden, is thrilled to announce the spectacle's venue which has a 13,000 audience capacity.
- "It feels a bit like a dream come true, actually. A couple of years ago we were telling jokes about how it would be cool to do e-sport in Globen," said DreamHack's head of e-sports Tomas "greykarn" Hermansson.
- "The fact that esports takes place in Globen is of course proof of that the interest keeps growing," Hermansson added.
- "Gaming and gaming culture is since long a very important piece in the young man's every-day life. It is no sub-culture or an odd phenomenon anymore - it is mainstream and equal to music, movies and other expressions of culture. With this in mind it is not strange that the interest for e-sport, livestreamed matches and crowd fests have increased radically over the past two years."
32 of Europe's best players will battle for a prize pool of $60,000 USD at the European finals. Nine of them will qualify to the world grand finals in Shanghai, China on November 17-18.
Already this weekend, Sweden will get a whiff of the e-sport success that spells WCS, with the Nordic finals coming to a close at the venue Annexet, one of the smaller venues in Stockholm Globe City.
The Stockholm Globe Arena has been the host venue for numerous notable events, including the Ice Hockey World Championships (1989, 1995, 2012), the Eurovision Song Contest (200), the MTV Europe Music Awards (2000), the Swedish Idol Finals (2007-2012) and the very first Ultimate Fighting Championship event in Sweden (2012).
Source: Aftonbladet.se via Rakaka.se
