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Would You Pay $9.50 to Watch eSports Live at Your Local Theater?

Canada’s largest theater chain sincerely hopes so.
Image: Flickr/BMiz

On Monday, Canada's largest movie theater chain in partnership with Sony announced an eSports competition with a twist: they're hoping fans will be willing to shell out $9.50 per ticket to watch their friends frag the competition, live, in a local theater, instead of watching a live stream at home.

In fact, there will be no live stream on offer for most of the matches.

The competition, hosted by Cineplex, will comprise of three rounds ofCall of Duty: Black Ops III. Qualifiers will be held online through WorldGaming, the eSports company that Cineplex purchased in September for $10 million USD. Regional finals will be held in theaters across Canada as live events. The final match will also be held as a live event, a Cineplex spokesperson told Motherboard in an email, but the match will also be streamed into 24 theatres across Canada and online with Twitch.

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Hosting matches as paid events without a streaming component is an interesting (and potentially risky) approach for eSports, where free online streaming is still the preferred method of participation for most spectators (and for companies to make a buck with ads). When Cineplex first announced plans for its eSports league in September, Lewis Ward, research director for gaming at IDC, told Motherboard that charging movie ticket prices to watch a match could be the theatre chain's downfall.

"If it's a couple bucks, I get it, but if they try to charge $15, they'll be in trouble," Ward told Motherboard at the time. "Most of these eSports competitions' content has been free online."

Even stadium-packing eSports events usually have a free live streaming component.

It's clear that, far from aiming for the stars when it comes to Cineplex's first foray into eSports, the company is starting small. The total winnings pot for the competition will be $50,000 CAD, with just $20,000 going to the winner. The prize pool for Valve's The International competition, in contrast, was more than $18 million USD. The winning team took home more than $6 million.

The competition's choice of game—the highly anticipated Call of Duty: Black Ops III—also makes it a bit of an outlier in eSports, which is dominated by strategy games such as Dota 2 and League of Legends, and to a lesser extent, classic FPS franchises such as Counter-Strike.

The competition is slated to start on January 16, with the final showdown happening on March 6. Pass the popcorn.