Jack Ma and Alibaba just dove headfirst into the world of competitive video games

If you haven’t been paying attention to the PC gaming market over the past few years, you may not have noticed that competitive video gaming has gone from a barely-understood niche industry to a sector that’s already competing with regular professional sports. Case in point: the League of Legends world finals match last year had 36 million unique viewers across the globe. Maybe those numbers pale in comparison to the Champions League final, but they’re already bigger than the viewership for some less popular sports like professional hockey.

Jack Ma and Alibaba have apparently seen the light, and on Wednesday they announced they’re getting in on the action with what they’re calling the World Electronic Sports Games (WESG). WESG, which will be run by Alibaba subsidiary AliSports, will be a new Shanghai-based multi-game eSports tournament. It will include competitions in Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Starcraft II, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, and Hearthstone, among other games. The total prize pool will exceed US$5.5 million, with the most popular games (Dota 2 and CS:GO) getting prize pools in excess of US$1 million that will also be bolstered by crowdsourced funds.

WESG isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of Alibaba’s eSports plans, either

With this move, Alibaba has instantly made WESG one of the most important global eSports tournaments on the calendar. Even without crowdfunding – which could well add millions to the prize pools – WESG’s prizes make it the most high-paying CS:GO tournament ever and place it among the upper echelon of Dota 2 tournaments as well. Prize pools of this size will attract top teams from around the globe, which in turn are likely to attract a massive (and fast-growing) global viewership.

WESG will actually begin next month, although just in the form of early qualifying rounds – the global finals held in Shanghai won’t take place until December. Alibaba says it has already invested more than US$15 million into the tournament.

WESG isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of Alibaba’s eSports plans, either. The company says that in addition to WESG, it will put on other eSports competitions, although it offered precious few details about what those might look like.

(In case you’re wondering: WESG will not include League of Legends, which is the world’s most popular eSport by viewership. That’s probably because between domestic leagues and existing international competitions there is little time left in the year for another League tournament, but it may also be because League’s competitive scene is closely managed by Tencent-owned developer Riot Games.)