MKP, NADA and MC to ESWC 2011

More about what you can win here.

This is your chance to take part in ESWC's Grand Final, if your country didn't had a dedicated qualification tournament so far. Our qualification tournaments are open for every European country, which didn't had its own qualification for the respective game. Want to know if you can play? Visit the portal and click on more information at your respective game.

Starcraft II has an US qualifier as well.

A small fee is mandatory to participate in our cups. It is $10/10€ dollar per person or 50$/50€ dollar per team. All cups will be held on September 19th. For more information and sign-ups please visit our:

- EU ESWC Online Qualification Portal
- US ESWC Online Qualification Portal

ESWC Grand Final 2011 will take place during Paris Games Week from 21st to 24th October this year and will feature a total of $200,000 in cash prizes distributed accordingly between 7 tournaments.

The online qualifier does not influence the ongoing application procedure to enter the tournament. If you get invited by ESWC and you get top8, your entrance fee will be refunded. The invite procedure is open to all players without qualification. Players will be picked based on achievements. More information about that here.

The history of ESWC can be split up in two parts. The brand was owned previously by Games-Services. They organized international standalone e-sports tournaments from 2003 until 2008. ESWC was for a long period of time the biggest and most prestigious e-sports tournament in the world. ESWC was one of the few organizers being able to organize standalone e-sports tournaments attracting then thousands of visitors. Only the WCG had better numbers in certain country's(Korea, Germany, China). Most e-sports history has been written on these ESWC events. Unfortunately NVIDIA pulled the plug in 2007. The organizers did the 2008 event but failed to find new sponsorship. Due to this, Games-Services went bankrupt and was not able to pay out its 2008 price money.

In 2009 the brand ESWC got bought by Games-Solution. It organized its 2010 event at Disneyland Paris. Many teams were skeptical, afraid that the event would be fake, they also demanded the new organization to pay out the old price money. ESWC was not forced by law to pay out the price money of the previous company but did published a bank guarantee. All teams attended and all winners got their price money few weeks after the event.

Now its 2011 and Games-Solutions organizes ESWC at the Paris Games Week. The company Oxent will be involved organizing the event. Oxent is owned by one of the previous owners of ESWC.

Blizzcon and ESWC 2011 Grand Finals will collide this year. Nothing that we can do about this situation. ESWC is taking place during the fair Paris Games week and that was set long before Blizzcon was announced. This means that players that qualified for battle.net finales at Blizzcon will not be able to attend ESWC.


The current owners of ESWC always paid out their price money a few weeks after the event. The previous owners that went bankrupt were unable to pay out its 2008 event. Read the history part to know more.


National qualifiers are organized by local partners. Local e-sports companies in most of the cases. These companies have been struggling to survive and are simply unable to organize local qualifications. 5 years ago it was a different economy and so its hard to find partners that are able to do this. Partners pay travel and hotel costs of winners of their qualification.

The model that ESWC is using for qualification is not working as good as it used to be. That's why the application procedure and the online qualifications were put together in order to make sure teams and players are able to attend our event.


The model of WCG is that Samsung pays everything. And that's really expensive model that works as long as Samsung pays the bills.


Bright, but we'll need to find new ways of making this work. Online qualifiers is one of them, but maybe something else.


Its up to teams to decide whether they want to attend or not. But regarding the statement, there are some facts that are not true. Teams and players don't "buy" themselves into the tournament, they apply. Specialized community figures will make a selection of these applications. Some will be accepted, some will not.

We hope that these teams that decided to boycott will still take the opportunity to qualify online.

The funny part of this story is, that many semi-professional organizations are willing and able to pay the fee. This matter has more implications on the CS tournament than on others. Some other community's(specially CSS) are also using this boycott to show that they see it as a positive thing and massively applied for a slot.

This application procedure is an extra service to the community. Its for a team to decide what to do with it.


Yes you do, its 10 dollar per person, 50 dollar per team. Its done via paypal and visit the payment information on the portal for more information.