Later this month will see the start of the Nordic University eSports Championships, a new League of Legends tournament for emerging gaming talent amongst Nordic students.

The championship is being hosted by Challengermode, a competitive eSports gaming platform, and HP. The championship features a 50,000 SEK (€5000) prize pool, which will be split among the top 3 winning Nordic teams. In total, 32 Nordic University teams have entered the competition, with 8 teams qualifying for the final tournament at the end of this month. This final game will be held at Jönköping University in Jönköping, Sweden and will be livestreamed via the Challengermode Twitch channel, as with previous Challengermode League of Legends tournaments:

I spoke with Challengermode’s Philip Skogsberg, co-founder/CMO, about the current professional gaming community in Nordic countries, and why Challengermode has teamed up with HP for the tournament: “The Nordics (especially Sweden) [have] been early to adopt esports and competitive gaming,” Skogsberg said, “I read somewhere that Sweden has the highest number of Counter-Strike players as a percentage of the total population, something like 3% of Sweden’s population of 9+ million. Pretty cool for such a small country. The pro scene is already quite mature in the Nordics and there are several pro teams from a relatively small population competing at a high level. But I think it’s the more organized amateur esports that [are] still lacking here. This is also one of the reasons we at Challengermode are doing what we are doing.”

Along with this desire to nurture “organised amateur eSports” teams and competitions, there seems to be a desire to compete with the eSports communities and competitions that exist in America, as Skogsberg explained to me: “In the US, college/university and even high school sports [are] very common. College teams which play American football and Basketball reach a very high standard. In Scandinavia, such a strong culture never evolved around spectator sports in academia or schools. This is fundamentally what we want to help facilitate in the Nordics.”

However, whilst the championships feature a hefty prize pool which will attract emerging pro talent, Skogsberg explained that Challengermode is also focusing on games which won’t bleed their players dry: “Whilst we do think this will help in nurturing pro talent, it’s also important that we are able to provide an outlet for the large number of competitive gamers who take their gaming seriously but don’t necessarily want to dedicate their youth to becoming a pro player in esports.” This, I think, is a good approach for Challengermode to take, considering the “burnout” that many young professional gamers face so early on in their careers, where they are pushed too hard and end up loathing a game which was once a fun hobby for them and their friends.

Finally, I asked Skogsberg about the enduring legacy of eSports, and how he feels about the community being regarded negatively by non-gamers: “When you talk to young folks and millennials, even those who aren’t gamers, they understand the draw of eSports and don’t have any qualms about accepting it as a “real sport”,” he said, referring to the general ages of the competing University students, “It’s the older generation(s) who still (although to a lesser extent) have a problem with accepting [professional gaming] as a sport. I think it’s mostly due to the seemingly non-physical nature of computer or video gaming. But as with much else, it’s just a matter of time until there’s no question to anyone that it’s as much a sport as anything else. You can argue over semantics and definitions, but when people are competing, and others are watching it with so much engagement – it must be some kind of sport.”

More information on the tournament can be found here and you can find Challengermode on Twitter @challengermode. They are also on Twitch, where the final game will be streamed.