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DreamHack, the computer festival and meeting place for gamers, fans and eSports enthusiasts, is coming to London’s Copper Box Arena for the first time this September.
The consumer event LAN gathering was first held in Sweden back in 1994. The UK is the seventh country the festival is expanding into, after attracting over 104,000 visitors and more than 15 million unique viewers via live stream to its events in 2014.
There will be an expo area featuring exhibitors, and some partners already on board include Monster, Intel, Eizo, Razer, HyperX, and Cisco.
One of the highlight features of DreamHack London will be the first British stop of DreamHack Open, an eSports (competitive gaming) tour featuring seven live LAN stops across Europe, open to both amateur and professional players.
Launched in 2012, DreamHack Open has featured StarCraft II since 2012 and will additionally feature Counter Strike: Global Offensive as the second official title in 2015. For the first London event, gamers are competing for a prize pool of $40,000.
DreamHack has partnered with Eventbrite which will exclusively handle ticket sales for the London event.
“DreamHack’s expansion beyond Swedish borders can’t be done without strong partners with knowledge about our audience and fans. With a global community translating to local events, the collaboration between DreamHack and Eventbrite could therefore not be any more fitting. Together we can now offer the world’s best eSports shows to an even bigger audience,” said Marcus Lindmark, CEO of DreamHack AB.
Limvirak Chea, Eventbrite’s VP of business development in EMEA, added: “Gaming is one of the strongest growing event categories on Eventbrite.
“We help bring the gaming community together at many of the largest gaming and esports events worldwide, and we know from talking to gamers around the world that they want more events, more often, and in more places. Which is why we are happy to help bring yet another high quality event to the British gaming community.”
DreamHack’s origin is the LAN party, with the two major festivals DreamHack Summer in June and DreamHack Winter in November. Organisers say the events are ‘a platform for eSports, knowledge and creative competitions, music acts, lectures by game developers, internet and game culture, cosplay, the fair DreamExpo and more’.
Tickets for DreamHack London are available on Eventbrite at http://dreamhacklondon.eventbrite.co.uk
Image credit: Abraham Engelmark
