During the first weekend of June, thousands of people flocked to the DFW area for two different major esports events.
The Overwatch Clash tournament was held at Esports Stadium Arlington, WFAA reported, with Dallas Fuel as the host team. Envy Gaming, a Dallas organization, owns the team.
Overwatch is a first-person shooter game, and the $225,000 tournament was its league’s first major event of the year. The four-day event brought in more than 4,000 attendees, according to WFAA.
The president of Envy Gaming, Geoff Moore, told the news outlet that the weekend’s tournament and similar events show that the North Texas region is becoming a major center for esports.
“It brings a lot of people who love [Overwatch] in from outside the state of Texas, from other cities in Texas to Arlington and the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” he said. “It really is fulfilling the vision that the City of Arlington had when they invested in creating this venue that they would bring people from all over the country and even other countries to events like this based on what these people really have a pent-up demand to see live and share with each other.”
Just a few miles away, the DreamHack Festival was held over the same weekend at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Center in Dallas. According to organizers, more than 33,000 guests attended the three-day festival. Visitors came from all 50 states and 29 countries, WFAA reported.
The festival featured tables of consoles and PCs for gaming, as well as live matches.
DreamHack is an international gaming brand that has previously hosted the annual festival in Sweden and multiple other countries. The Vice President of strategy and growth for the company, Shahin Zarrabi, said North Texas was the perfect location for the 2022 event.
“Dallas loves gaming. So many gamers here, esports teams, organizations,” Zarrabi explained. “We came here in 2019 for our first event in Dallas, coming from Austin before. Dallas has shown us so much love, so it was a given for us to come back here.”
After being away when the event was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zarrabi said he was excited for DreamHack to be back this year.
“We want to create a platform for everyone to come and connect, to explore, to be themselves,” he told WFAA. “Everything gaming under one roof. That doesn’t mean you have to sit and play or watch someone else play. It could be that you dress up as someone in a video game … or that you meet your favorite creators from online.”
The 2019 DreamHack festival in Dallas generated around $3.6 million in revenue, Zarrabi shared.
He added, “I hope Dallas loves us as much as we love them.”
