Chinese esports solution provider VSPN and Tencent jointly announced that the 2021 Peacekeeper Elite World Championship (PEC) would be postponed due to the current global pandemic. The original PEC event will be replaced by Peace Elite Super Cup 2021, a new domestic event that features a ￥2 million ($310,000) and will be sponsored by OPPO. The further location and actual date of PEC will be announced soon.
The 2021 PEC was supposed to be hosted in Shanghai Mercedes-Benz Arena on July 31 with a ￥12 million ($1.85 million) total prize pool. It should be noted that this is the first Tencent-related esports international event that has been postponed due to the “global pandemic situation” this year. In December of 2020, the League of Legends Pro League (LPL) All-Star event was postponed due to the COVID-19 concerns in the host city of Chengdu.
This information is also indirectly a bad sign for Valve’s Dota 2 annual event – The International 2020 (TI10), since Tencent has evaluated the global pandemic situation and is not optimistic.
“In order to support and cooperate with the COVID-19 restrictions and controls in multiple overseas countries, and keep our players and audiences’ health and safety, we decided to postpone the PEC after long consideration about the current global pandemic situation,” Tencent stated.
On June 21, Valve announced that TI10 had moved away from Sweden and been looking for alternative locations in Europe. The event would take place on Aug. 10-15 in Stockholm.
