South Africa Joins the Pokémon Video Game Championships
Every year since the beginning of the Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC), we’ve had at least one new country thrown into the mix. Last year, it was Australia. This year, we’re receiving our first country from Africa: South Africa. A fairly new country for Organized Play, South Africa appears to have a very active distributor who is interested in growing Pokémon in the country!
South Africa will receive three Regional Championships this year along with one National Championship. TCG players in South Africa are included in the same rating zone as Europe, but as of now it is unknown whether the video game will use a Championship Points system or have a separate qualification system from Europe. The most likely scenario right now is that first place in each division at the National Championships will receive an unpaid invitation to the Pokémon World Championships in Washington, DC, USA.
Planned Event Dates & Locations
Regionals
- March 14th, 2014 in Cape Town
- March 28th, 2014 in Pretoria
- April 18th, 2014 in East London
Nationals
- June 14th to 15th, 2014
Nationals is expected to be in Cape Town this year but may change. These events will run concurrently with the Pokémon Trading Card Game so players will need to pick one over the other.
Thanks to Jayhonas for the tip!
About the Author
Firestorm is one of the co-founders of Nugget Bridge and the Community Manager for eSports Tournament Platform Battlefy. He has been playing Pokémon since 1999, competitively since 2007, and attending tournaments since 2010. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with a degree in Interactive Art & Technology + Communications. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushanshekar.
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29 Responses to South Africa Joins the Pokémon Video Game Championships
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Que complaint posts about Europe not even having announced events this year and a circuit that consisted of unrelated events last year while South Africa gets a relatively coherent circuit in its first year
Is there actually any reason as to why Europe information is so.. hard to gather? I know nothing has been said about this season (which in itself is already disheartening), but this suspense of not knowing where, when and even what pokemon will be allowed is really not encouraging growth for this organized play thing.
I’m honestly surprised we didn’t see the South Americans added if anything. At the very least, they were organized enough to contact us for USA vs. South America. Personally I’ve never met any VGC player based in Africa, so I’d like to hear some reasoning behind this
Safe assuming the answer is that it’s a local tournament organizer thing rather than a TPCI thing
Europe is a continent with many different countries each with their own distributor who is in charge of Organized Play for the country. These distributors who run the events deal with TGC product in the country and they’re who we piggyback off of for events. I imagine it is tricky to coordinate with multiple countries with a different company in charge of each country. Someone who plays TCG in Europe might be able to shine more light on how many Regional events they have though as I’m not too sure on that myself.
Players who contact other players for battles doesn’t amount to much if their PTOs don’t contact TPCi which is what looks like happened in South Africa. Having someone running your tournament scene who actually cares about the game accounts for a lot! Players in countries without VG Organized Play should bug their TCG Organized Play people for VG events while XY is out and people are excited about the video game!
I’ve attended TCG regionals in the UK, and honestly, without a bit of an overhaul, we’re not going to be able to add VGC to them. They’re in the side rooms of gaming shops, which are really small as it is, and barely have room for the TCG, let alone any VGC. I always have to awkwardly choose whether to push crotch or ass against the players in my row when i finish early and go to leave my seat, thats how cramped we’re talking.
That said, it seems like an overhaul would be worthwhile. A proper regionals to nationals system would be much appreciated. Tying the two products would do this, and alleviate then inevitable anger coming from the mismatched amounts of CP available in VGC while we all let this sink in.
Wait seriously?
As much as it was lauded at this previous year’s Worlds how multinational the event was, this can only be considered a good thing. Hoping to eventually see South America involved as well.
Im sorry I found this ad funny in conjunction with the thread title.
External
This Community is growing already.
This is awesome. Mad respect.
The advent of a new region to compete in the VGCs is always nice. Sure other regions that have been around for a bit longer may still have some problems to be resolved but I think it’s a good decision on behalf of the higher ups that run the VGCs to expand to more regions of the world. If we want our community to grow and become a more substantial entity in the competitive video gaming world I do believe that by making the VGCs more of a global phenomenon can draw in a lot of new players and support. The increase in prize support on the local level and the expansion of the VGCs to new areas of the world makes it seem that over the next few years we may see even more positive changes, albeit that’s not necessarily certain. However, I do believe right now is a great time to be a VGC player and I’m glad to be a part of this friendly community.
This is great! If Africa can get an event that means there’s hope for Guam (my homeland). I mean both places have like a VGC population of less than 1 right?
Cheers to adding peeps and mixing it up though on a more serious note. It is surprising that we didn’t see a return of Australia or even Canada.
For those comparing South Africa to Europe I’d like to remind that South Africa is a country while Europe is a continent with 50-ish countries.
Fun for South Africa and Poke community in any case!
so south Africa gets 3 regionals and a national…
but Canada gets 2 regionals… at most
I know it probably sounds naive, but I had no clue they even had enough of a player base for VGC lol.
But yeah, as Scott said, more international players is always fun.
If the invite structure is how the article says it is, then the amount of regionals/circuit structure isn’t even particularly significant. It seems like they really need the regionals in order to build a playerbase before Nationals rather than to make it a yearlong competition with points working toward invites.
BC is cancelled and toronto might be as well.
Canada has probably had the most unstable “circuit” ever, but as usual we’re just blended in with the united states. we can have worlds but no regionals allowed!!! must drive minimum 2 hours to participate
my closest event is almost 5 hours and i live in merica
Scott let’s fly all over
i think i’m just lucky i live right near the border. really anything is better for Canada than the year we weren’t allowed to play :U
looking forward to seeing results from africa though, i think it’s interesting to see players from places we never really considered, whether or not anyone from there actually gets to worlds
As a South African, I think this is awesome news.
I’ve been playing Pokemon since Red & Blue and lurked NB for about a year now but didn’t join as I didn’t have anything to contribute due to the lack of a competitive scene here in SA. PS! and other sims have been the only form of “competitive” battling available to South Africans and I’ve been playing singles since the start of DPPt but the Doubles meta on Smogon has been very limited and they seem to draw the most users for online sims.
The fan base is definitely here, my local game store manager told me their stores sold out of X&Y nationally after only 2 days as they didn’t anticipate the massive demand. The Regional/National format is just what we need, it’s probably the best shot at getting good turnouts and finally starting a competitive community here.
Hopefully a sign of things to come and, who knows, maybe I’ll see some of you at Worlds next year.
Off-topic for a second here
To give some sort of update – PAX Australia has been confirmed as being held on the weekend of Halloween in 2014 so if Australia is to get Nationals again it will likely be at a seperate venue. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a similar case to last year and people are only given a few weeks’ notice
Back on-topic, good to see more expansion internationally
So why are they on Fridays and not on a saturday/sunday like everywhere else ? Its great to see the expansion of the community.
I’ve been hearing about a lot of organization in South Africa for a couple of years now, it’s good to see them go all the way and join the World Championship!
Feathers: I don’t know anything about BC being canceled in terms of Regionals. Toronto is canceled. VGC nats is canceled. Montreal is a rumour right now.
As for the European events, they’re dealing with mass retirement of pro players and TOs from what I heard, at least in the TCG scene. I’m guessing it’s the same TOs, so they’re probably behind because the new organizers for Finland, Iceland, Denmark, iirc France and Spain as well, have to get their ducks in a row.
Oh god, I really hope they manage to organize it fine in the end. I don’t see the UK mentioned there so does that mean there aren’t so many problems if any happening in the UK?
Also just a side note on serving larger player bases: I live in the same town as where the UK VGC usually takes playe (30m bus journey!) and I find that barely anyone from my town attends (Mainly people I know because I have got to know them through competitive play) And to also note a great % of players are from the rest of europe not England. I never see any advertisements for the VGC event in England considering they could get quite a good deal of XY buyers knowing that there is a chance they can take part in the qualifiers which is an exciting thing! Seems like a missed chance of marketing for Nintendo for me.
Also there are two Pokemon clubs in my town: One is just on TCG, the other has mainly events related to TCG and a just a single page with the ruleset for VGC that only meets for 2 hours. With stuff like that I haven’t gone to either yet (probably should to try it out myself) but the way the focus is mainly on TCG with little focus on VGC kinda worries me with competitive communities just meeting up a few times a year (UK event too this year)
Sorry if that was a little incoherent, and yeah I know, UK probably has it pretty good compared to Italy who deserve a championship most due to the larger competitive community there. Just frustrated because of lack of advertisement.
The UK seems pretty well organized from the news of tournaments lately. It’s the British – they’re all about getting everything perfectly organized, then bungling it at the last minute, aren’t they?
As for TCG vs VGC – most clubs that meet up in real life, regardless of locale, are more TCG focused than VGC. The TCG has a MUCH larger playerbase than we do, though that number is shifting on both sides of the equation, with the EX block in TCG causing a moderate reduction in competitive players, and VGC getting more popular.
The UK lost its PTO this year but you guys should be good to go for Nationals. I wouldn’t worry too much about Nationals. None of the countries Purity named had VG Nationals last year. Spain didn’t have Organized Play period.
The reason you see a lot of TCG groups and not video game is because they’ve had 9 years of organized play and counting. If you want more video game groups, you’re going to need to step up and expand it. Get a couple of friends together, talk to one of the league leaders, and make a weekly meeting spot for video game players!
Ah, that makes a lot of sense, hmm would be fun to see if I could get together a meetup of sorts and get some community going
I see some of the better players often know each other well and live close or go to same Uni so that makes sense!
YES 100% XD
QFT. Pokemon has historically had a community with a very top-down organization, and that absolutely needs to change if things are going to expand.