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“This collaboration will provide a deeper meaning and purpose to all of our properties, allowing us to provide fans with more thrilling experiences than before. On the other hand, it also represents a much larger and more attractive opportunity for sponsors and media to engage with the esports audience,” said DreamHack Co-CEO Marcus Lindmark. “ESL Pro Tour mirrors our ambition to provide up-and-coming players with a clear pathway to become tomorrow’s esports professionals.”
“ESL’s growth in recent years has led us to rethink what we are doing. We have built some of the world’s most impressive esports tournaments, and it was the time to connect the dots where the outcome is a bigger picture that fits better with our vision for esports,” said ESL CEO Ralf Reichert. “This partnership between ESL and DreamHack will give youths a clearer and more complete path to becoming somebody, and a structure that is more welcoming and digestible for new esports fans.
Tournaments in the ESL Pro Tour will be organized into Challenger and Masters levels. The Challenger level will include DreamHack Open, the Mountain Dew League and ESL’s National Championships — those competitions will serve as a platform for teams to elevate themselves to Master- level tournaments. The Masters category will largely be arena tournaments with $250,000 or more in prize money, and will still feature the world’s best teams —these will include ESL One powered by Intel; Intel Extreme Masters; and DreamHack Masters. It will also include the 2020 format of the ESL CS:GO Pro League.
Teams will win points in the ESL Pro Tour ranking, and the best of them will compete in two Masters Championship finals each year at the world’s largest and most attended independent CS:GO Tournaments — ESL One Cologne (Germany); and Intel Extreme Masters Katowice (Poland).
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