Kotaku
The Championship Gaming Series is getting its own draft and it's going to be held at the Playboy Mansion in L.A.
The new series, which has bonuses and salaries of $5 million for the 2007 season, will kick off with the draft on June 12.
"This is the moment the gaming world has been waiting for," said CGS Commissioner Andy Reif. "We will be paying salaries and bonuses to our players in excess of $5 million dollars during the 2007 season. The time has come for a new era of professional gaming as sports entertainment. Your chance to be a part of history starts on April 28."
Counter-Strike: Source and FIFA 2007 will be official PC games for 2007 while Dead or Alive 4 and Project Gotham Racing 3 will be the Xbox 360 titles for the DirecTV backed league.
Hit the jump for a run down of qualifiers and team make up.
Los Angeles, CA - The Championship Gaming SeriesTM (CGS), the first global professional gaming
league, today announced that worldwide salaries and bonuses for the 2007 season will exceed $5 million,
a new benchmark for professional gaming. CGS has also announced the official games and schedule in
its North American region for 2007. Qualifying for North American league play will begin April 28 and the
first draft in history will take place on June 12 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
"This is the moment the gaming world has been waiting for," said CGS Commissioner Andy Reif. "We will
be paying salaries and bonuses to our players in excess of $5 million dollars during the 2007 season. The
time has come for a new era of professional gaming as sports entertainment. Your chance to be a part of
history starts on April 28."
Valve's Counter-Strike : Source and EA's FIFA 2007 will be official PC games for 2007. For the Xbox
360, CGS will feature Tecmo's Dead or Alive 4 (DOA4) and Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3) from
Microsoft Game Studios.
The official CGS 2007 event schedule will feature online and live qualifiers where players will battle to
reach the Regional Combine, scheduled to take place at the legendary Fox Studios in Los Angeles from
June 8-10. Players from the Regional Combine will then be drafted onto one of six city-based teams at
the 2007 CGS Draft on June 12 at the Playboy Mansion. CGS online qualifiers for the North American
region begin on April 28, 2007 with the first live qualifier to be held at The Bridge Cinema de Lux in Los
Angeles on May 11-12.
Each CGS team will feature a total of ten athletes per team, each of whom is a specialist in one of the
official league games. Five of the ten players will comprise a Counter-Strike: Source squad who will
compete in five-on-five matches. The soccer title FIFA 07 will be played one-on-one. Each team will have
a mixed-double team of two DOA4 players, one man and one woman, who will play against other teams
in one-on-one matches on Xbox 360. The racing game PGR3 will be represented by two players on each
team and matches will be played in a two-versus-two format.
Soon-to-be announced dates for the full global slate of 2007 CGS events in the UK, Europe, Asia,
Australia, Latin America, and the Middle East will yield regional representatives for the CGS Grand Slam
and World Championships, to be held in Los Angeles this October.
CGS events will be broadcast in North America on DIRECTV's The 101. For more information, please go
to www.thecgs.com.
Comments
I'm still looking for the make-up they will be wearing...
"Hit the jump for a run down of qualifiers and team make-up."
Pro gamers are total nerds.
What a way to waste your life by playing games for a living.
I can't wait to see where this is going. Video games, if you think about it, can encompass so many different sorts of activities and talents into one sum, all intended to entertain and in some cases to bring people together.
"sports" entertainment?? uhh....
Of all the fighting games, DoA4 is what they picked?!? Even if they say the better fighters are older and don't output in hi-res HD programming, there's still Virtua Fighter 5, which is infinitely more in-depth than DoA.
nothing like dropping 100 virgins into the playboy mansion. We are looking at a new Waco Texas!
@droptop: I know. The first thing I recall ever being called sports entertainment was the WWE. Popular, yes, entertaining, eh, legitimate.... well, they certainly are... athletic. I doubt the same can be said for these people.
Video gamin ain't no spectator sport! You don't want to watch other people playing for an extended amount of time, you'll eventually want to pick up a controller and play.
Didn't it drive anybody nuts back in the day of 2 player alternating (insert nostalgic title here) where you wanted your friend to mess up and die right quick so you can get a crack at the level?
@NotoriousJnX: Tell that to the Koreans.
@vgachi:
I was thinking of making a similar comment, but consider that most fighting game players who would watch match videos already do, and most fighting gamers who would watch match videos are usually not going to watch, let alone play, any DoA game.
Why watch people I've never heard of get picked to play a game that sucks when I can already watch people I know are good play games that are good? Obviously, I am not the target market for this whole affair.
Also, the whole "man-woman team" idea for DoA sounds terrible. I'm not going to start a whole thing of guys vs. girls, but arbitrarily picking teams based on sex rather than on actual skill is nothing but a ratings-grabber for stupid people. Then again, that seems to be the primary demographic they're going for, and they'll probably take any ratings they can get. I'm waiting for the day that gaming and TV can come together and not be aimed at retarded middle-school kids and possibly acknowledge the fact that most gamers are actually adults now.
FIFA 2007? DOA? Um.... no comment.
damn i sure as hell wouldnt watch this but im pretty kickass at cs source.. and im unstoppable at fifa console versions. if i were in la id own the shit out of anybody at fifa (conciderig i can use a gamepad)..
Aren't a lot of the people kinda young to be at the Playboy Mansion? I mean, isn't that one Halo 2 player, like, 6 years old or something? He does this, he's going to have bragging rights over all his friends for, like, the rest of his life.
Hint: DOA may not be as technical as VF, but to the target audience (males 10-25), DOA is a lot more fun to watch. Bounce-bounce-bounce....
Currently only 18+ will be drafted, so all the under 18 crowd won't be going to the Mansion.
theendoftheline: Online qualifiers for the CGS are happening now, show off your kickassedness assuming you are in North America.
http://www.championshipgamingseries.com/events/north_ameri...
Why did my post not show up? Ugh...
For the record, as much as I love them, video games are not a sport.
Playboy Mansion, you say?
*CLEARS CALENDAR*
The choice of games... so bad.
With the draft location being the playboy mansion this part caught me by surprise "Each team will have a mixed-double team of two DOA4 players, one man and one woman .." if they really wanted to include women they would have chosed a different location but I guess female gamining pro's are used to putting up with lots of crap. The location certainly makes it seem more like a boys club to me.
@IndigoFerret:
thanks dude i just registered for cs.. but really fifa is much more my forte, im eventually gonna get creamed in cs if i even make it in. i donno if i want to go to the trouble of getting fifa and a proper gamepad cuz im relatively broke..
The mere thought of watching other people play bad videogames is making me bored. I can't even imagine people sitting down in front of their TV in the living room to watch people play DoA.
if they wanted to do console games, wtf... no halo?
and i'd take soul caliber, tekken, virtua fighter, or some of the capcom 2d fighters over DoA.
and Fifa is a random choice.... if they wanted to do a sports game, it should have been madden imo.
@NotoriousJnX:
Go buy quake 3 and
Come to area 51 or download some team matches from highly ranked teams then tell me you don't like watching people play. Some players out there truely are incredible!
Then on top of that the quake 2 players where almost alway deadly with just a machine gun!
It's too bad these games are not on there. Really though Who ever gets or draws the best players will be rolling in the money. This could actualy help QA testers for game developers too!
lol this is funny and i doubt will last long, Most people dont wanna sit and watch others play, I wonder how long it will take a black man to come in and dominate like they do most other sports? JK
Video games dont take practice or skill like real sports, you pretty much have to practice 80 hours a day, playing the same game over and over, and you pretty much win every time that way, thats what fatality does he plays a game 17 hours a day and memorizes every thing.
Real sports you really cant win that way.
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