The gaming world was proceeding as normal this week, until a British eSports-focused website got their hands on an email that claimed that the World Cyber Games - the Olympics of professional gaming, and essentially the only major gaming event to consistently gain coverage in Australia - was going to drop all of its PC games in favour of the mobile varieties.

People questioned the validity of the publication, but the doubt was all but quashed on Wednesday after the tournament organiser for last year's WCG in Australia confirmed to Gamearena, Telstra's gaming portal, that the email was legitimate.

Since 2000, the World Cyber Games has been an integral part of every serious gamer's calendar, being the only tournament left where gamers feel like they can represent their country on an international stage in the digital world.

At the turn of the millennium, it was South Korea's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, along with the Ministry of Information and Communications and Samsung that helped put together the World Cyber Game Challenge, which drew in 17 countries from around the world to compete in Quake 3, StarCraft: Brood War, FIFA 2000 and Age of Empires II.

The World Cyber Games then grew from its roots in Seoul, with more than 1 million players taking part in national qualifiers in 2004 and having the world finals hosted all around the world, including Monza in Italy, Cologne in Germany, San Francisco and Seattle in the United States and Singapore. Even locally the event has been held at variety of interesting locations, including Sydney's Luna Park and most famously in 2002, "WCG on the boat".

Over the course of the last decade, Australia has sent 119 representatives to compete at the World Cyber Games' global finals - not including the contingent that was shipped to Korea for the World Cyber Games Challenge - in a variety of games, including Counter-Strike (1.5, 1.6, Source and Condition Zero); Halo (2 and 3); FIFA (2002, 2003, 2006, 2010 and 2011); Project Gotham Racing (2 and 3); Warcraft 3, Starcraft: Brood War and its sequel, Starcraft 2; Dead or Alive 4; Unreal Tournament (99, 2003 and 2004); Quake (3 and Quake Wars); Guitar Hero (3 and World Tour); Age of Empires and Age of Mythology; and finally, Asphalt 5.

Despite our lack of infrastructure down under to support professional gaming, the World Cyber Games has often been used as a platform for players to kick-start their careers: Warcraft 3 players Andrew Pender and Phil Miraldo were both able to leverage their showing at WCG to boost their international profile, with the latter joining German eSports behemoth Mousesports and the former becoming one of the country's most internationally recognisable Starcraft 2 gamers - travelling to Korea and multiple global tournaments.

Interestingly, despite Australia's unwavering support of the event, the lucky country had very little success in the global digital arena, only securing its first gold medal two years ago for Asphalt 5, a mobile racing game which will no doubt become a cornerstone of the WCG lineup now that the move away from more traditional competitive titles is solidified.

Still, the national qualifiers have always been a great focus point for gamers around the world, giving players an opportunity to meet up, compete and share their love of competitive gaming. Warning: the third video contains profanity and footage of drinking, but it's a good example to show the social side of tournaments, which often gets forgotten when family groups start warning about the violence and just how anti-social gamers can be.

The question is now: how much will that all change?

In some regards, WCG's decision - or Samsung's really, given that the South Korean electronics manufacturer owns the organisation and has been injecting tens of millions of dollars into the event since its inception - makes a lot of sense. Samsung's previous asset of monitors and TVs was more successful overseas than its mobile phone division. The release and success of the Galaxy Tab and the Galaxy Nexus, however, makes it obvious from a business standpoint to use WCG as a marketing tool for what will clearly be one of the company's biggest revenue raisers over the next decade.

It's not too dissimilar from a decision taken by the Cyberathlete Professional League a decade ago when it opted to drop Quake 3 from its schedule in order to better financially and physically accommodate the rise of Counter-Strike. The decision was clearly successful - Counter-Strike is still one of the pillars at many tournaments, WCG included - but it would have also been possible for the league to simply include both games to diversify its product a little more.

The same question can be asked of Samsung and WCG. PC gaming isn't going anywhere any time soon; Samsung isn't going to stop production of flat-screen TVs and monitors any time soon either. Couldn't the Koreans find a way to accommodate both? Over the last few years, that's what they've done. The prize pool for Asphalt 6 last year was US$55,000, well beyond the prize pools dished out for Counter-Strike (US$34,000), Starcraft 2 (US$27,000), World of Warcraft (US$24,000) and FIFA 2011 (US$14,000), despite all of the latter vastly outstripping the mobile racer in popularity.

The timing for the decision is bizarre as well, given that public voting this year's games opened just over a month ago. It's possible that the decision could have been made well in advance, but the poll was put out anyway to avoid suspicion (given that WCG has always opened up the public vote in February for several years now).

Another possibility is simply a sharp drop in funding. This actually happened last year, with organisers of national qualifiers all around the world discovering by email that their budgets had been dramatically slashed even though many had yet to run a full set of qualifiers for their own events, let alone select representatives for the grand finals. The cost of moving hardware and a substantial amount of people from around the world isn't cheap, and the ongoing problems of the global economic crisis and a downturn in business across North America and Europe certainly would have been felt in Samsung's South Korean headquarters.

Sadly, all this speculation is really only achieving one thing: to dance around the fact that the one truly great international tournament is no more.

That's not strictly true, of course: WCG will still be there as long as Samsung continues to fund it, which it no doubt will, being a fantastic marketing avenue for the company's various products. But it won't be the same, so to honour the passing of one of the bastions of eSports, please enjoy a series of videos that will remind you of what WCG was truly like, and what it has decided to walk away from.

Alex Walker is the regular gaming columnist for ABC Tech + Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @thedippaeffect