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DreamHack change ownership

DreamHack has signed an agreement with MTG in which they will acquire 100% of DreamHack AB, the World’s largest computer festival and one of the World’s biggest esports companies. MTG is an international entertainment company and is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in Stockholm.

You can break down DreamHack’s twenty-one year long history into three chapters. The first chapter started with the foundation of DreamHack back in 1994, when the two founders Martin Öjes and Kenny Eklund hosted the first event with 40 people in a school cafeteria. DreamHack grew exponentially over the years and became the World’s Largest Computer Festival after three consecutive Guinness World Records.

In 2006, as part of DreamHack changing ownership a first time, DreamHack entered the second chapter in which DreamHack developed the LAN-party to become a Digital Festival, adding tons of new activities, content, music, esports, expo – making it a social event for a much wider audience, and also making DreamHack one of Sweden’s largest youth festivals.

In 2010, DreamHack entered the third chapter in which DreamHack became one of the World’s largest esports tournament organizers and broadcasters. As one of the first esport partners to Twitch (then called Justin.TV), DreamHack was one of the pioneers pushing esports into a broadcast format optimized for live streaming. Hundreds of millions of watched content later – DreamHack has established some of the most well-known esports championships such DreamHack Open, DreamLeague and the Swedish Championship, ESPORTSM. DreamHack also started to expand the festival outside of Sweden, starting with Spain, then Romania, Russia, France, United Kingdom and in the upcoming year DreamHack will enter two of the largest gaming markets in the world – Germany and United States.

As part of this development, DreamHack has turned Jönköping and Stockholm into two global hubs for esports. DreamHack has actively been pushing eSports into sports stadiums, giving esports mainstream coverage and convincing more sponsors to support this movement. But most importantly, DreamHack has helped swedish gamers to become the best in the world by giving them a platform of competition in their backyard.

Our vision for the future and a new chapter

Looking ahead, it’s time to enter a new chapter. DreamHack has a vision to make DreamHack the no.1 festival for an entire generation of gamers. In order to do this, we want to set-up new DreamHack festivals in more countries and build a strong, stable and sustainable event franchise that can bring the unique DreamHack experience not only to Swedish gamers, but to gamers across the globe.

With the acquisition made by MTG and a long-term commitment from the current management and the key employees of DreamHack, we now feel extremely confident about our plan for the coming years. DreamHack will have an ambitious plan to grow the brand and the festivals. We believe that our new owners can enable a faster international expansion as well as continue to solidify Sweden as one of the main destinations for esports in Europe. This commitment and also the support of MTG can help us develop our festivals to new heights, where DreamHack can be a unique bridge between online and offline.

We see this as our fourth chapter.

DreamHack management remains in charge of the business, and DreamHack will continue both run DreamHack events and DreamHack esports tournaments. The big difference is that we instead of having one large angel investor as the owner, we will have a large international company, specialized in digital entertainment.

“DreamHack is built on a true do-it-yourself mentality. Something I experienced as volunteer crew back in 2002 but also now as CEO. As part of that DNA, we have already achieved great things and will continue to do that in the future. But in order to take next leap, from being equal size of a normal swedish music festival and become global event company – we believe that MTG is a perfect owner of DreamHack the coming years.”

said Marcus Lindmark, CEO of DreamHack. “Esports attracts a lot of different of investors right now, but in MTG we found a Swedish company that share the same entrepreneurial approach as DreamHack.

We’re extremely proud about the development we made the last 5 years, but we’re even more excited and thrilled about the coming 5 years, and how far we can take DreamHack.”

said Stefan Magnusson, VP of DreamHack. “DreamHack is entering the most exciting chapter yet, where we get the opportunity to truly develop the DreamHack brand in the direction we only could dream about. MTG have a strong strategy and esports vision, where we can play an important role but DreamHack is also adding something completely unique to that vision”.

said Tomas Lyckedal, Business Development Director

About DreamHack

DreamHack is the World’s Largest Computer Festival. DreamHack’s roots and core is the LAN party, with the major events DreamHack Summer and Winter, where participants bring their own computers and connect to the Internet in a large local area network which basically BECOMES the Internet by sheer scale. DreamHack is also Sweden’s first consumer-oriented trade show / event / festival for computer games, game consoles and computers. The events are a platform for tournaments in eSports, knowledge and creative competitions, concerts by famous music artists, lectures by game developers and much more.

Learn more about DreamHack at: http://www.dreamhack.se