I

ndonesia is trying to catch up in the world’s new e-sports trend by searching for a forthcoming squad out of the 57 million active players across the country.

The Indonesian Esport Premier League (IESPL), in cooperation with the Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf), the Youth and Sports Ministry, the Communications and Information Ministry and the Cabinet Secretariat, have set up an “Esport President’s Cup” that is running from January to March.

The maiden cup tournament, which opened in Palembang, South Sumatra on Feb. 9 for a two-day session, is applying regional qualifiers before ending in a grand final round at Istora Senayan in Jakarta on March 3. The tournament competition features the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang game.

“The [President’s Cup] tournament is aimed at finding new talents for Indonesian e-sports. We’re hoping to welcome at least 4,000 contestants to this event,” said IESPL vice president Rangga Danu Prasetyo on the sidelines of the cup’s opener in the Palembang Sport Convention Center on the weekend.

He said Indonesia had at least 57 million active video game players aged between 16 and 34 years old. Since starting as a national league last August, the IESPL has recorded about 100 million downloads of e-sports platforms in the country.

The head of South Sumatra’s youth and sports office, Ahmad Yusuf, said the cup would alter the public’s perception of e-sports from being an “entertaining” activity to a “serious and professional sport”.

“E-sports will also be contested as a sport in the upcoming Southeast Asian [SEA] Games in the Philippines [in November and December], so we have to get going to prepare our athletes for the national training camp.

“There is a career in e-sports and [the athletes] will receive a similar treatment as [athletes] of other sports,” said Yusuf.

The cup’s qualifying round is to be held in eight cities and regions: Palembang, Bali, Surabaya in East Java, Makassar in South Sulawesi, Surakarta in Central Java, Manado in North Sulawesi, Pontianak in West Kalimantan and Bekasi in West Java.

Each region is to have 512 players competing in the qualifying round. In the next round, the best teams from eight regions are to participate in a boot camp held by IESPL coaches and managers.

The first two qualifiers — in Palembang and Bali — are to be played on an offline system. However, because of public demand, the remaining six are to be played online.

In the Palembang opener, the Professional Esports team from Medan, North Sumatra won the qualification round that allows it to participate in the Jakarta grand finale. Professional Esports defeated 13 Link Sport of Pekanbaru, Riau in the two-day competition over the weekend.

“We will have six weeks of preparation. We will practice to improve our team’s performance and solidarity,” Billy, the winning team’s coordinator, said. He added that the training would likely be conducted in the evenings as the squad was made up of students.

E-sports, a video-game-based sport, has been increasingly earning recognition over the past few years. The world took notice when professional gamers began live-streaming their competitions in the late 2000s, Forbes reported. By 2010, e-sports became a significant factor in the video game industry, according
to The Verge.

In Indonesia, the sport earned public attention after being exhibited in the 2018 Asian Games, which were held in Jakarta and Palembang from August to September. Indonesia won a gold and a silver medal in the quadrennial event.