Farming Simulator League

Microsoft recently announced a new version of Flight Simulator, coming in 2020, so this month we’re looking at why people decide to spend hours playing simulators!

这是一个模拟器特别…几周前和…the first ever Farming Simulator League took place at Farmcon in Harsewinkle in Germany…

The format was a 3 v 3 championship to " determine who is the best in the field".

The prize pool was 11,000 Euros… not as much as Fortnite, or the DOTA 2 championships The International… but this is early days.

Chris Berrow caught up with Lars Malcharek, eSports Coordinator at GIANTS Software who developed Farming Simulator… he actually organised this first ever Farming Simulator league…

Chris - If you think about the game and the community and that's what I hope we can do now there's been some criticism... I know you didn't watch Fortnite but there's been some criticism of Fortnite and other sports as well people say well you know it's not really a sport. Isn't it sad and stuff that I obviously don't think that. I think it's a great thing. But what do you say to people who are kind of saying why are you doing farming simulator leagues online. Shouldn't you be doing something else?

Lars - I personally don't agree. No I think having competitive gaming is something that people love. All right. When I was super young I played Street Fighter against my friends at home or WWF wrestling or anything. Obviously people love watching other players play against each other. BD fortnight all league of legends or whatever. I mean games are made to have fun and if people watching it are having fun then I think we do the right thing. And that's exactly where we stand with farming simulator or with farming to Major League. It obviously is the right thing to do.

Chris - Talk us through the winners there was that one person who stood out from the sexual championships this league or was in a various different winners in various different events.

Lars - The winning team was Trevor Borg and I think it was because of their leader Felix. He is a very young guy but he's very clever and has a really really good player. He came just up with strategies that worked so well that he could beat everyone else. There was a French team competing. They were called SDL and when they started playing no one knew them before they came out of nothing and started beating everyone. They were so good and they lost against Trevor Borg. Just because Felix came up with a fantastic strategy to beat them and it worked. And afterwards he taught me look I knew that it either works or we lose. Within two minutes. But you know it is what it is.

Chris - Finally your plans for the future. Are you going to come back next year. I know we obviously just in the recent aftermath of it and you probably won a few days off and everything that. Are you going to come back with this?

Lars - I think we will. So this league is running for a year and we have the what we call a world championship even if it's technically more a European competition right now next summer and then afterwards we're going to look into this and see did it work. Did people enjoy it. Did people like it. Do we still have sponsors backing up because without sponsors we'll be a little bit hard to maintain everything. But our plan is to keep this for the foreseeable future.