The organizers for the Evolution Championship Series (EVO) have announced on Twitter that due to the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, they will be officially canceled this year’s event. EVO 2020 was scheduled to take place from Friday, July 31 through Sunday, August 2 at The Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The official lineup was revealed this past February, which included the legendary fighting game Marvel VS. Capcom 2 as part of a special tournament with past champions. In the same post, the organizers announced that an online-only event will now take place instead of a physical one.
As seen in the tweet above, the EVO personnel will be “refunding all purchased tickets.” To clarify this, they tweeted a response in the same thread stating “All arena tickets and hotel room reservations will be refunded automatically, there is no need to call in.” Essentially, this means that and anyone who purchased ticked events, hotel rooms, and any of the Grand Final matches won’t have to do a whole lot to get their money back. They added that they will have a form up sometime next week for cancellation options, trying to make the process that much smoother.
As for the online event, the only thing they mentioned in regards to this is that there will be more information on the way at some point. While we hope that they will keep the official lineup intact, we wouldn’t be surprised some changes were made due to whatever constraints they encounter. Quite frankly, managing a plethora of competitors whilst ensuring that their internet connection will stay afloat during, and in between matches sounds like an extremely arduous task. It’ll be interesting to see just how the organizers approach this scenario.
Like E3, EVO is one of the longest-running video game events in North America and arguably the longest-running fighting game competition as well. From 1996 to 2001 it was known as Battle by the Bay, where it was held in Sunnyvale, California. Slowly but surely the event gained more traction, and in 2002 it was moved to Los Angeles going by the now famous name of EVO. In 2005, the event took place in Las Vegas for the first time and has remained there since. EVO isn’t the only video game convention to be delayed or canceled due to COVID-19. Major events that were affected include E3 2020, GDC, Overwatch, and Call of Duty League, and Riot Games esports activities.