Organizers of the second China Internet Gaming competition in Shanghai, China's top computer gaming championship, announced during the final that they hope to replace the South Korean-based World Cyber Games as the most important computer game competition.
About 200 players and 32 teams from all over China attended the competition to battle in such games as FIFA2003, a soccer game, Counter Strike and WarCraft 3 as well as traditional chess and card games, with winners gaining cash prizes of up to US$3,614.
"We host the event to develop the domestic cyber game industry. We hope to build it into the world's largest computer gaming competition in three to five years," said Feng Hong, director of the China Internet Gaming Department yesterday. According to Feng, China now has more than 100 million computer game players, far more than South Korea's several million gamers. CIG is a non-profitable organization supported by the Ministry of Information Industry, the Internet Society of China, the Ministry of Culture and the State General Administration of Sport.