CGS Announces Wuhan Optical Valley Electronic Sports Stadium

The official name for the facility sounds like a bad April Fools' joke, but the facility itself is real. The CGS is building a training center for eSports.

You can find the official press release here.

Cliff Notes Version:

"In a groundbreaking move for eSports, Championship Gaming Series, the
only worldwide professional gaming league, the government of Wuhan and
the Wuhan Hi Tech Group, today announced the creation of the world's
premiere eSports training center and professional gaming arena at the
Wuhan Optical Valley Electronic Sports Stadium. This initiative marks a
new step forward for the digital entertainment industry in Wuhan and
the worldwide professional gaming community.

In addition to serving as the training center for the CGS Wuhan Dragon
team, the new facility will be the location for the upcoming CGS 2008
Pan-Asia Final from April 30 to May 3."

It's obviously a big step for eSports. Even though online competitions are easier for the competitors, the future of competitive gaming is undoubtedly LAN competition. Having a place dedicated to practicing in a LAN environment is a great asset.

Despite the apparent benefits, I'm not sure what to make of the facility. What service will it actually provide? Will it just be a huge LAN center? Will there be staff there to actually teach/coach players? Are there going to be regular or semi-regular events held so people can get more playing experience? All of the above?

These questions will probably be answered in the coming days (or weeks, months) as the Stadium starts to take shape. For now, I'm definitely curious to see what the CGS has in store. I hate to bring up the idea of money, but they're not building this out of charity. There has to be some tangible benefit for the CGS to invest those kind of resources, and I'm wondering what the "business model" is, so to speak.

Still, it's an exciting announcement, and a good sign the the CGS is dedicated to building a league and not just throwing money around. They're by no means perfect, but embracing the community and helping foster growth from the ground-up seems like a much better plan than raining money down from above, Pacman Jones-style.

Hopefully we'll see the day where this becomes the standard, and we'll have eSports stadiums in different nations across the world.

(And I'm sure everybody would be playing WoW there, too.)