Professional, competitive Google Maps will be an Esports World Cup event with a GeoGuessr tournament recently announced.
This year’s record-breaking $70m+ (£52.7m+) Esports World Cup will feature 40 esports clubs competing across 24 of the biggest esports titles, including League of Legends, DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Valorant.
Chess was a surprising enough addition to the event but now GeoGuessr has also been confirmed for this year’s tournament.
For those who don’t know, GeoGuessr is a website that drops a player in a random location in the world using Google Maps Street View then the competitor needs to, as accurately as possible, mark on a global map where they think they started.
The niche game has built quite the following and has a growing esports scene, with last year’s GeoGuessr World Cup featuring a prize pool of over $57k (43k).
This year, the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia will host a GeoGuessr Last Chance Wildcard tournament this July, though this will be a side event as part of the Esports World Cup festival.
It will not be an official title at the event where teams can earn Club Championship points for achieving the most high-place finishes across all the main events.
The Last Chance Wildcard tournament hasn’t had any details confirmed, but it will help players qualify for the GeoGuessr World Cup 2025 finals which will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark from August 29-30th with a prize pool of at least $100k (£75k).
The World Cup invites the top 12 players from the game’s global rankings. Pro players can earn significant points to climb these rankings by competing at three LAN Majors: the APAC Major in Tokyo on May 18th, the Americas Major at DreamHack Dallas May 23rd-24th, and the EMEA Majors at the first ever Glitched event June 13-14th.
Fan backlash from GeuGeussr Esports World Cup announcement
While GeoGuessr isn’t an official event at the Esports World Cup, the announcement was still met with significant backlash amongst the community.
The Esports World Cup Foundation, the organisers of the event, are backed by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund which has been accused of using sport and esports events to distract from the Kingdom’s human rights record.
This GeoGuessr fan on X (formerly Twitter) was very critical of the announcement, saying: “Marketing your world championship as diverse and inclusive but then deciding to make a wildcard in Riyadh out of all places is such an unbelievably stupid decision.”
One of the participating organisations, Team Liquid, have revealed they will still wear their Pride jerseys while competing at the Esports World Cup.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
