On top of football clubs joining the world of eSports, it is now the turn of banks to get a slice of pie.
ESL Australia has announced today that St.George Bank will become a sponsor for the second season of ESL’s Australia and New Zealand championship series. The second season of Counter-Strike began this week and runs until November, and will be broadcasting matches every Tuesday and Wednesday night.
The matches will fill in some of the weekly time slots left over by the Oceanic Pro League for League of Legends, which aired every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 6:00 PM. The ESL AU & NZ Championship starts bit later than that, but still manages to run into the hours of the evening, with scheduled times being from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM (5:00 PM to 9:00 PM AWST).
St.George’s general manager of retail banking, Ross Miller, said the following about the partnership in a release:
“We are seeing a large and growing number of St George customers embrace online games every month. Even in my household, it’s not just the kids playing and watching online games. Gaming connects all generations and St.George is proud to support this emerging trend and be part of the eSports community.”
While the support of a bank might sound like a lot of money provided to CS:GO, this isn’t the case. The overall cash prize is $35,000 for the tournament, which isn’t exactly on the same level as the prize pool offered at the Call of Duty World League or even the Australian nationals for SMITE at PAX Australia last year, but it’s still a fairly respectable amount of money. That said, there are still plenty of Counter-Strike tournaments to play in and for banks to sponsor. Now that they seem to be starting to take notice of eSports, it shouldn’t be too long before those prize pools begin to hike up.
