eSports on the rise
Gamers from Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Philippines got together recently to compete in the GeForce Esports Xtreme Tournament (GEXT) 2017, an eSports (internet gaming) tournament at the Glorietta Activity Center in Makati City. The event was organized by technology company Nvidia.
The teams battled for supremacy in multiplayer online games DOTA 2 (Defense of the Ancients) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS GO). Teams from Thailand and Vietnam emerged as champions. According to Nvidia Philippines country manager
Jerome Matti, over 1,300 teams from these countries have been fighting for slots in the finals for the past six months. The tournament kicked off last June in Manila and concluded just last November.
A predominantly male crowd of internet gaming fans ages 12 to 40 trooped to the venue to watch the competition live. GEXT 2017 was staged in GeForce Certified iCafes featuring gaming PCs driven by Nvidia GeForce GPUs in the participating Southeast Asian countries. It was supported by gold sponsors Colorful, Coolermaster and Palit along with silver sponsors Galax, MSI, Thermaltake and TTesports. The goal of Gext 2017, which was streamed live, was to grow the gaming community in the region by creating more accessible opportunities for amateur gamers.
Nvidia put up the $10,000 prize money with the help of its partners and mounted and organized the tournament.
Matti said, “This is the first Southeast Asian finals and it was held in the Philippines because there is a fast growing gaming community here. Nvidia plans to stage GEXT again in 2018. We were warmed by the enthusiastic response with thousands of teams taking part and millions more following GEXT either at the event venues or online. Nvidia and our partners are thrilled to be able to help fan the growing interest in eSports across the region.” Nivdia APAC South consumer business director Simon
Tan added that the company’s award-winning GeForce GTX 10 series GPUs enabled the gamers to have a better gaming experience.
Nvidia designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming, cryptocurrency and professional markets. It also creates system-on-a-chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automative markets. It is best known for its GPU product line called “GeForce.”