Citing Virus Fears, Epic And Valve Scrub Fortnite And Dota 2 Championships in 2020

If you were looking for championship-level play in your favorite free-to-play game this year ... well, you'll have to look a little harder. Two of the industry's premium developers recently announced that their biggest competitions would be put on hold for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Valve has announced that this year's edition of The International, the championship event for Dota 2, has been delayed, and it's "likely that the event will need to happen in 2021."

Given the highly volatile landscape for local gathering restrictions, virus trajectory, and global travel policies, we don’t expect to have enough confidence to communicate firm dates in the near future.

Meanwhile, Epic Games has put the brakes on the 2020 Fortnite World Cup, which will not occur this year, "Due to the limitations of cross region online competition." Other scheduled in-person competitive Fortnite events will be held online, details of which can be found in this Twitter thread:

Physical Events - For the rest of 2020, all Fortnite competitions will be held online. Due to the limitations of cross region online competition, there will not be a Fortnite World Cup in 2020.

— Fortnite Competitive (@FNCompetitive) April 30, 2020

It's unfortunate that these major events are being put on hold for the coming year, but it's also understandable considering the trajectory of the disease, especially in the parts of the world where it has yet to be contained and isolated. Here's hoping things will be better by this time next year.