Changing: WCG to reformat as mobile gaming festival

One of the oldest and most successful eSports competitions is giving up on PC and console gaming to focus exclusively on mobile games.

The radical re-envisioning is detailed in a leaked email from World Cyber Games CEO Brad Lee, received by eSports hub Cadred from an anonymous source.

"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 and publishing," Lee wrote.

"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."

Lee continued on to say that the backing organisation had made the "hard decision" to focus solely on mobile gaming.

"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," he concluded.

WCG is said to be in talks with publishers and sponsors to lock down the games and events of its yearly program.

As unbelievable as this news seems, GameArena received confirmation of the communication's authenticity from an Australian World Cuber Games representative.

The World Cyber Games kicked off in 2000 and are managed by a South Korean company. Its 2011 line-up of events included Counter-Strike, FIFA 11, League of legends, Starcraft II, Tekken 6 and World of Warcraft tournaments.

The WCG's announcement comes as a surprise; the eSports scene has grown enormously over the last few years, helped along by the ongoing success of Major League Gaming and the rise of MOBA as a tournament genre.

Thanks, Kotaku.