In a roundtable meeting with PCGamer and other media publications, Valve talked about a possible relocation of their annual International event.
The Trump administration's seven nation ban, although suspended for now, has a number of eSports companies in a fix, and Valve are no exception here. The visa drama makes the news every year around time of The International, and most recently we got to see how even the Majors are suffering last minute adjustments because of the same old story of players not being able to get their US visa.
According to PCGamer, Valve’s Erik Johnson and Gabe Newell discussed the ban problems yesterday at Valve’s studio from Washington. “Any pressure on visas getting into the United States is worrisome for us,” said Erik Johnson. He went on “We're gonna run the event no matter what. Ideally we'd run it here (in Seattle) because it has a bunch of advantages being close to our office. But the event's going to happen. So yes, if it became too difficult, we'd find a way.”
Trumps’ seven nations travel ban is still suspended after yesterday a panel of judges upheld the temporary restraining of the ban in court. Moments after the court decision from yesterday, President Donald Trump reacted on twitter:
While the ban is still disputed between the US administration and the court, there is a high chance the executive order will be reinstalled, which is why Valve has to start looking into options for the seventh edition of The International.
Now, we are aware that any move would produce a massive logistical challenge, but if Valve were unable to run the event in the States, what would their options look like? The most obvious one would be Vancouver, Canada which is a bit over 200 km, approximately 250 miles away from Seattle. Vancouver has several large stadium options, most of them home of the ice hockey and baseball local teams. However, all of them have a capacity that goes up to 50,000 seats. And, looking back at all the Valve events, we learn that our Dota 2 publisher does not like to run events on stadiums, their own International being held for the past three years at KeyArena which holds a maximum capacity of 17,000 seats while in the first years the event was located at the 2,500 seats Benaroya Hall.
With four Major events already held with third party organizers all over the globe, Frankfurt, Shanghai, Manila, Boston and now looking up at the Kiev Major, Valve might also consider for TI7 one of the locations used for the Majors, except Boston of course. So, for all those of you who are impatiently waiting for a TI held in Europe, we would say this is the year when it might actually happen.
Click here for results, VODs and all the other information
