Global tournament organizer BLAST announced on Tuesday that it has opened the “host destinations process,” and is looking for partners to find key locations for its 2024 events. In 2023, BLAST hosted events in Paris, Washington, D.C., Madrid, London, Copenhagen, and Lisbon, and in 2024 it will pick similar international destinations for its competitions.
In a release, BLAST said that it will begin accepting proposals from interested parties to “find suitable locations and partners” for its global tournament circuits in a variety of games in 2024 including Counter-Strike 2 (BLAST Premier) and Rainbow Six Siege (BLAST R6). In addition to hosting official competitions for Counter-Strike and Rainbow Six Siege, BLAST also facilitates events for Dota 2, Valorant, Apex Legends, and Fortnite, among others.
James Woollard, head of commercial solutions at BLAST, noted in the announcement that the benefit of a city hosting one of his company’s events is that it helps those locales be recognized “as tech hubs, while providing wider socio-economic benefits, including educational programs, festival opportunities, and commercial partnerships.”
More importantly, events that bring tens of thousands of industry professionals, competitors, and fans into a region provide an economic impact, though what that is specifically tied to a BLAST event has never been disclosed publicly—as far as we know—until now: Woollard claims that visitors (“over 60% on average from outside of the host city”) have provided more than €22M ($24.7M USD) in economic impact for “host economies” at previous BLAST events.
