1st anniversary of IeSF’s Inauguration, IeSF’s leap towards

1st anniversary of IeSF’s Inauguration, IeSF’s leap towards ‘Game Olympic’s IOC’

-Increased to 14 membership countries… gained achievements like agreement on opening Challenge competitions and setting international standards

November 13th, 2008 marks the International e-Sports Federation’s(Kim Shin-bae, IeSF) first anniversary since it was officially founded with all eyes from all e-Sports fans and representatives. For a year, IeSF has continuously strived to create an international e-Sports competition, and the efforts will be realized through upcoming December’s opening of ‘IeSF Challenge’in Taebaek. Also, it has endeavored to make international standards of e-Sports, and will introduce ‘International Referee Standardization’ which is one of the international norms for e-Sports at the Second IeSF Regular General Meeting in Taebaek.

For the past 365 days, IeSF has made its utmost efforts ensuring internal stability, promoting membership countries to the federation, opening international competition, international standardization of eSports and much more. First, the IeSF has promoted and registered 9 countries to join as membership countries, including South Korea, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Vietnam, and Chinese Taipei.

Firm internal stability

While other international e-Sports competitions promote participating countries every time they hold, IeSF promotes membership countries like Olympics. By promoting at least 5 more countries by the end of this year, it is expected that membership countries will increase to 14 countries.

Besides promoting membership countries during the last year, IeSF has also pushed ahead its plans to open an international e-sports competition. IeSF will open ‘IeSF Challenge’ in December, where 150 players from 20 countries around the world participate. In addition, IeSF’s main projects include international standardization process related to e-sports players, referees and more. Experts expect that both two projects will soar the prestige of South Korea as the birthplace of e-sports.

For some time, South Korea’s stance as a native country of e-sports has shaken a bit. Excluding ‘Starcraft’ other player’s performance and interests have faded away, and all kinds of e-sports competitions sponsored by domestic localities have ended up as a regional festival, rather than stretching out worldwide.

By taking advantage of this opportunity, countries like China, Japan, and European countries have shown aggressive moves towards e-sports, and have greatly made South Korea possibly lose ground as the mainland of e-sports. Amid this domestic and foreign crisis, the inauguration of IeSF has once again provided an opportunity to consolidate South Korea’s stance in leading the e-sports. Through 10 years of knowhow on e-sports and passionately persuading countries fond of e-sports such as Germany, Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Vietnam, and Chinese Taipei, it has added 9 more membership countries to their federation.

Contributing to enhance national stance as the homeland of e-sports

Right now, global interest is hiking even in non-membership countries. Countries such as England, Singapore, and South Africa has participated the IeSF Symposium which took place in August at Gwanan-ri to check IeSF’s preparations, and have all made great remarks. The secretary-general of IeSF Oh Won-suk said in an interview that IeSF will promote more membership countries, from the current 9 to 20 by the year 2010.

Still, there are still more things to be done for IeSF after an endeavoring year. First, although ‘IeSF Challenge’ is the first international competition, many say that participating countries, players and the size of competition is smaller compared to other e-sports competitions. For this, secretary-general of IeSF Oh won-suk said “since ‘IeSF challenge’is like a preliminary competition, it is unfair to say that the competition is not promoting enough countries and players. Since IeSF is a confederation of membership countries, we are focusing more on membership countries’ involvement and possibilities, rather than the number of participating countries.”
As stated by the secretary-general, countries participating countries at IeSF Challenge are all members or prospective members. Secretary-general of IeSF Oh Won-suk also added that there will be no changes on the matter in the future.

Future challenges: number of membership countries and e-sports entries

There are also concerns on the limited entries of ‘IeSF Challenge’ which is ‘Warcraft 3’and ‘FIFA Online 2’ For this matter, secretary-general of IeSF Oh Won-suk said “We admit that there were some difficulties pushing ahead both competition and entries at the same time since May. However, we have done our utmost to select entries that all membership countries can enjoy.“He also stressed that “those two games will match well with the international e-sports competition.”

The IeSF plans to select games that are suitable for game Olympics, rather than merely increasing the number of games.

In the meanwhile, IeSF is also planning to complete the standardization of most international e-sports norms by next year. There may be some continuing detailed changes regarding different requirements for each country, but it will strengthen its stance as the leading country of the federation by setting the big frame. IeSF will also promote the two non-membership countries China and Japan.