WCG ends with PC gaming; go mobile

The World Cyber Games will shift their focus onto the mobile phone gaming platform and will discontinue with all PC games.

The news about WCG to focus on mobile phone gaming has hit the streets, but still no official announcement has been made from the South Korean organization. Although WCG announced their annual game voting a while back with CS 1.6 featured, it looks like they have changed their mind now.

A few days ago the rumor popped in various forum threads and pcgames.com.cn also brought a report on the matter. Today, cadred.org posted a leaked letter they have come in possession of. The letter has allegedly been sent out to all WCG partners, signed by WCG CEO Brad Lee.

The leaked letter reads:

"In recent years, the gaming and IT trends have been moving so fast. In the current status of gaming and IT industry, one of the most remarkable information to us was the mobile shipments have exceeded the PC shipments.

As wide spread mobile devices, mobile gamer would rapidly increase as well. In this situation, the major PC game publishers have been expanding their investment and business in the mobile game development & publishing.

This information was very cruel to us since we had been committed to the PC-Based gaming event for long time. We have witnessed that there have been many companies and organizations who went out of business because they didn't put effort to change. Therefore we concluded that we should create WCG's new identity.

Under this circumstance, we made a hard decision that we should bring the mobile, new key sector in the game industry, in our event concept. Hence, WCG decided to start the Mobile Game-Based Festival.

To create the Mobile Game-Based Festival, WCG is under the discussion with the sponsors and game publishers regarding new event structure and the countries for new festival. Therefore, there will be no longer present event module, such as Pan Championship, and PC-Based National Finals. And, the official game titles of WCG will consist of mobile games."

The official WCG titles will therefore in the future only feature mobile phone gaming at their events. Mobile phone gaming has already been featured at several of their events. In 2009 the CS final between fnatic and AGAiN was moved off main stage for the second map, in order to make room for mobile phone gaming.

Also last year we witnessed WCG go big with mobile phone gaming, handing out the biggest prize at the 2011 finals to Asphalt 6 on Samsung's Android smart phone. A total of $55,000 went to top three finishers, with the winner taking home $40,000.

With the focus switching to mobile phone gaming, we can look back and at the 11 years where WCG featured PC titles, including Valve's Counter-Strike every year.

Year	Host city	Winner	Winnings
2011	Busan, South Korea	ESC Gaming	$25,000
2010	Los Angeles, USA	Natus Vincere	$25,000
2009	Chengdu, China	AGAiN	$35,000
2008	Cologne, Germany	mTw	$50,000
2007	Seattle, USA	emuLate	$55,000
2006	Monza, Italy	PGS	$60,000
2005	Singapore	Team 3D	$50,000
2004	San Francisco, USA	Team 3D	$50,000
2003	Seoul, South Korea	SK Gaming	$40,000
2002	Daejeon, South Korea	M19	$40,000
2001	Seoul, South Korea	LnD	$40,000

Stay tuned as the World Cyber Games are still to make the official announcement of the shift to mobile phone gaming.