ESPN has announced a new city-based esports league and Las Vegas is one of the participating cities. That’s right, ESPN has announced that Elevate from Denver, Circa from Miami, and Simplicity from Las Vegas will head up the new Esports Battle League (EBL). The League will be run by tournament organizer Rivalcade.
[Clarification since original post]: While there have been several Esports teams in Las Vegas such as Rogue and the Las Vegas MiniGunners, Simplicity will be our first city-based esports team. City-based teams were first introduced with the announcement of the Overwatch League, and now leagues such as the EBL are following their lead.
These three teams have competed in titles: Smite, Heroes of the Storm, Call of Duty, Halo, and various fighting games. Each team will need to cough up one million dollars to join the league and it is expected that three to five more teams could join the league soon.
What is the League About?
The league was first announced last summer as the Live the Battle League and was put together by Rivalcade because of a common problem in the esports sphere of disparity. Scott O’Leary of Rivalcade says,
“The professional esports scene is very fractured… The top esports organizations participate in a wide variety of esports titles, but with little commonality or continuity.”
This is a problem throughout most of esports and Rivalcade is smart to address it with its new league. It is not yet known which games the league will compete in, but EBL is in talks with the likes of Blizzard and Hi-Rez to secure rights to games such as Overwatch, Hearthstone, Paladins, and Smite.
What Does This Mean for Vegas?
Simplicity has been around since January 2017. The fact that this team chose Las Vegas for a city-based esports team in the ELB says a lot for the potential in major esports for this Mecca in the desert.
Simplicity is confident that this league could succeed and is impressed with Rivalcade:
“I love what the EBL is doing. They are filling a much needed niche, and it’s going to be huge. Our team is 100 percent committed to helping the EBL grow,” says Simplicity Owner Jed Kaplan, minority owner for the Memphis Grizzlies.
Establishments such as the Millennial Esports Arena and The Esports Arena at the Luxor could turn into major competitive venues for esports events such as the EBL. This shows that Las Vegas is ready to become the esports capital of the world. All that is needed now are more city-based esports teams. And with Rivalcade’s EBL, this is starting to happen.
EDIT: An earlier version of this article included “Circa from Miami” as one of the city-based teams in the EBL. However, on Feb 27, Circa announced they would be closing down.
EDIT: An earlier version of this article pulled information from “Simplicity Esports”, which was confused for “GGSimplicity”. The appropriate corrections have been made. We apologize for the confusion.