Several ministers brought together the ecosystem on Monday e-Sports to design the national strategy for the next three years, with the focus on the bid to host the Olympic week in 2024. Four major actions have been selected.
It is at the Maison de l’e-Sport, for once, that Ministers Amélie Oudéa-Castéra (Sports, Olympic and Paralympic Games), Rima Abdul Malak (Culture) and Jean-Noël Barrot (Transition Digital and Telecommunications) exchanged views with around thirty players in the sector. Around the ministers, we thus found sports teams, organizers, the media, communities, representative organizations of e-Sport (including France Esports), the union of software and leisure publishers, and even the committee organization of the 2024 Paris Games.
A national e-Sport structure will emerge
The actors in question had already agreed on five main objectives for the period 2020-2025:
- Structuring the e-Sport ecosystem;
- better support associations and amateur practice in the territories;
- remove obstacles to the development of the practice;
- facilitate the hosting of major international e-Sport events;
- and host Olympic Esports Week in France at the end of 2024, just after the Olympics.
Regarding the action plan decided around these objectives, the first point consists in launching a prefiguration mission, which will allow the creation of a national structure to pilot and implement the national e-Sport strategy. This mission will aim to develop the practice, the supervision, the high level, the training of the actors but also all the economic aspect.
It remains to make the decision on the legal form that the structure will take, which according to the government, will have to benefit “ innovative means of financing “, without further details, but adding that public and private actors are called upon to collaborate. The conclusions will be made in the summer of 2023.
The State wants “responsible” promotion and brings out its talent passport
More political, the second point evokes the interest of favoring the supervision and development of the practice in the territories in a logic that is at the same time responsible, collegial and readable. This will notably involve the creation of a map of e-Sport players who promote associations or facilitate interactions and synergies between players.
Regional antennas will also be set up in two to four pilot regions (the South region will be one of them). The “responsible promotion” of the discipline will have to demonstrate the virtues of effort and creativity, as well as risk prevention, such as addiction, sedentary lifestyle, isolation or online violence.
The players in e-Sport and the government also want to strengthen the dynamism of France, through its companies, its competitions, its video games and its teams. The ministers took the opportunity to draw the “Talent Passport” (born from a 2006 law) which could be issued to high-level practitioners, in the form of a multi-year residence permit.
France, candidate for the Olympic Games of e-Sport
Finally, France no longer hides its ambitions to host Olympic Esports Week in 2024, the first edition of which will take place in Singapore on June 22, 23, 24 and 25. A bid committee was officially created for this purpose on Monday, January 16, 2023. It will be led by the French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF), the Interministerial Delegation for Major Sporting Events, Paris&Co – esport and the organizing committee of Paris 2024.
We are therefore talking here about a very serious objective, with a project expected by public actors in the spring of 2023. Until then, the CIO should refine the specifications and the scope of the ‘event. This is Matthieu Péché, manager of the Vitality team on the game counter strike (CS) who will coordinate this committee. He was already a bronze medalist in Rio in 2016.
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