posted by Malystryx.GDS,
Fragbite Masters announced its third season earlier today as well as a revealing that for the first time the event will include a LAN Finals. However, DOTA2 which was included in both of the previous seasons will not feature this time around. What sorcery is this? We caught up with Pontus Eskilsson, Fragbite's Director, to find out.


Pontus Eskilsson, Director of Fragbite
The first two seasons of Fragbite Masters were held exclusively online, with Alliance triumphant in season one and RoX.Kis in season two, both winning $15,000 for their efforts.

Fragbite, which will still run their Masters for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and CS:GO, has been around since the glory days of Counter-Strike 1.6 in the eSports circuit. We talked to Pontus Eskilsson, Director of Fragbite, to see what caused the decision to drop DOTA 2.

"There is actually a really easy way to explain why DOTA2 wasn’t included in the third season," said Eskilsson. "There are too many tournaments happening this autumn. It was too packed. I don’t really think the scene would benefit that much with yet another tournament. Too many matches for the teams, fans and organizers to keep track off. If we look at the second season we experienced a lot of schedule issues and we couldn't run a consistent tournament due to the sea of other tournament organizers out there."



Bruno and 2GD in FragBite Masters Season 1
In the current climate with most competitions starting off with as much as $40,000 or $50,000 even before ticket sales profits are included, Fragbite Masters did feel the pinch. Would more prize money have made their tournament a higher priority for teams and players? "Yes, of course. I can’t argue with that," said Eskilsson. "But the fact still is that there is too many tournaments happening this autumn, which means that it feels like it would still be 50/50 that the top teams would attend."

"It’s always been like this in e-sports: money talks. A couple of years ago, $20,000 was a lot. Today, not so much. Time changes fast. The prize pool is important to the players, they, just as the organizers put in a lot of hours to compete in different tournaments. So of course, teams will prioritize the tournaments with more money."

Fragbite's withdrawal for some may be considered an inability to keep up with the competition but Fragbite's kingpin is modest in evaluating Fragbite's position. "We're not going to lie, DOTA2 tournament is a hard nut to crack and since we're a multiple game title tournament it's hard for us to compete with the more established tournaments. This doesn’t mean we wont try it again in the future. We love DOTA2 and the community. We haven’t really dropped DOTA2 completely."

This article was written by uk Lawrence Phillips, joinDOTA's Editor-in-Chief.Malystryx has been in eSports since 2004 working as eSports Editor for Razer and Editor-in-Chief of SK Gaming in the past He misses the days of Warcraft3 but makes do with the world of DOTA 2. After taking a 3-month hiatus as Editor-in-Chief he is now back.Location: Bristol, UKFollow him on @MalystryxGDS.

Comments