The International Olympic Committee has voted for the creation of the first Olympic Esports Games, only without the games people care about. While esports has been a fixture of the gaming landscape for years now, its path to being recognised as a sport by the Olympics has been a somewhat slow crawl. The first major step came with the creation of the Olympic Esports Series, which was first held in Singapore in June 2023.
The event faced criticism, however, over the choice of games on the line-up, which ranged from Gran Turismo 7 , a version of Fortnite where you shoot targets instead of people, Just Dance, and obscure oddities like Tic Tac Bow and Zwift. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has now taken a significant step forward in its esports push by officially approving the creation of the Olympic Esports Games, although the games involved are still not what you’d expect. The standalone event is set to take place in 2025 in Saudi Arabia, which is currently hosting the first ever Esports World Cup .
An exact date and venue is yet to be decided, but it comes as part of a 12-year agreement between the IOC and the country to host the event. The Olympic Esports Games will act as a standalone event outside of the actual Olympics, and it’s currently unclear whether winners will actually receive medals (participants in the Olympic Esports Series last year won small trophies instead). Speaking about the announcement, IOC president Thomas Bach said: ‘This is truly a new e.