The COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive impact on the gaming industry, and few areas have been more affected than the esports sector of it all. Packing hundreds of excited audience members into an arena to watch a professional match is, unfortunately, a recipe for disaster during a viral pandemic.
Because of this, a great number of tournaments have moved online, from League of Legends to Hearthstone and everywhere in between. Blizzard announced today that their next stop on the Masters tour, the Hearthstone Masters Tour: Jönköping, will be taking place in a completely online format.
Introducing Hearthstone’s first new class since launch: the Demon Hunter!
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— Hearthstone (@PlayHearthstone) March 17, 2020
Jönköping isn’t the only stop being affected, though. Blizzard has also gone ahead and moved the next stop, the Asia-Pacific leg of the tour, online as well.
“To maintain the global integrity and fairness for all competitors, Masters Tour Online: Jönköping will still take place June 12-14 during Central European Time, while Masters Tour Online: Asia-Pacific will take place July 16-19 during Korea Standard Time.”
“The Masters Tour is built around the principle of a global community of players coming together to compete, and the relationships forged at each event are core to Hearthstone esports,” Blizzard writes in their announcement. “We will keep tracking the global situation and are excited to hopefully get back to coming together in-person for both Masters Tour Montreal and Masters Tour Madrid later in the year.”
The two tournaments that are being affected, Jönköping and Asia-Pacific, were set to take place this summer, but Blizzard is trying to look forward to the future. Hearthstone Masters Tour: Montreal was set to take place in mid-September between the 11th and the 13th, while Madrid was set to take place just before the end of the year between December 11th and 13th.
While we obviously don’t have any information peering into the future, one would certainly hope that this would be enough time for the world to have calmed down a bit. There’s no telling what the future can hold, of course, but Spain and Canada will hopefully be able to continue with regular life without having to worry too much about the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the months move on, we’ve got plenty in the esports world to look forward to. Hearthstone recently crowned the champion of the most recent leg of the Hearthstone Masters Tour at the Los Angeles stop, a tournament that was originally moved from Indonesia before having to be moved online. With more and more tournaments being moved to an online format, the organizers will hopefully only get better at holding them.
