CGN Esports Recap 2020
As we start 2021, we want to offer a recap on CGN Esports in 2020 and a short outlook on what you can expect from us this year.
By the end of 2019, some of the best players in both Super Smash Bros Melee & Ultimate joined our Smash lineup. In Melee, CGN Esports is represented by Red Bull Athlete Mustafa "Ice" Akcakaya, player & content creator Faed “SchlimmShady” Shadid and the upcoming Dominik “Nicki” Kunze, who is ranked first in Germany.
We are also well represented in Ultimate by Brawl veteran Ufuk “cyve” Fidan, the honorary Australian Khang “Tru4” Tran and the young “Tarik” Fayazi. Our Smash players began 2020 with notable performances at several major events, such as at Valhalla in Denmark and Dreamhack Leipzig. Tarik also showed up at Glitch 8 in the United States and managed to take some impressive wins there. It was shaping up to be a good year for our Smash players.
But during March 2020, the first lockdown occured due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many tournament organizers had to cancel their events, which means that the European Smash Circuit and the Smash World Tour have unfortunately been postponed.
Furthermore, our first European Smash event "CGN Open" had to be restructured as well, as players from all over Europe had already registered to participate. Within a week, we successfully ran the event in an online format: "CGN Open Wifi''. With more than 300 participants and the support from our partners Razer, Philips and Recaro, this tournament was very successful. Thus, it did not take long for us and our partners to start working on another event: more on that later.
It became clear that this pandemic would affect the Smash esports community heavily, as offline events and majors would not be possible for an indefinite amount of time. That is why our Smash players have been mainly focusing on streaming and playing in online events, as this allows them to stay in touch with their friends and the Smash community.
At CGN Esports, we used the period presented by the lockdown to review our strategy and to plan a portfolio expansion, which will mainly take place online. We decided to found CGN Esports GmbH in August 2020, in order to take our next step towards professionalization. Now we are set and prepared for a successful year 2021.
After Riot Games’ successful launch of the Valorant Beta, we started working on a concept with Razer for the European Valorant community. The result was the two-day "Valorant Contenders Cup", which was organized by CGN Esports and sponsored by Razer and Intel.
The tournament was capped at 128 teams and more than 640 players from all over Europe competed for a shot at the €1500 prize pool. The event was a great success and has been one of the biggest events organized for the European Valorant community thus far.
The great feedback and interactions we received from the Valorant community convinced us to become part of this new esports title from Riot Games. This means that we will be announcing more information about our involvement with Valorant soon: stay tuned!
We are looking forward to a successful 2021 with our CGN Esports Family and we wish every one of you a good start into the new year.
Be sure to follow our journey on Twitch, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram & to join our official Discord server to stay up to date on everything from CGN Esports!