VKLiooon Writes History As First Female Champion At The Hearthstone Global Finals

VKLiooon, a female Hearthstone player from China, has won the Hearthstone Global Finals and $200,000 by defeating bloodyface in a very one-sided match. The final score was 3 – 0 and with this victory, VKLiooon managed to gain the attention of esports fans from around the world. Unfortunately, it’s not very often that we see women compete at the highest level and win a truly important title.

What This Means for Women in Esports

Unlike traditional sports, where women have many options to choose from if they want to compete at the highest level, esports offers women very few chances of proving themselves and playing in a league of their own. Right now, their only real option seems to be the one that VKLiooon took: to compete with men and actually be better than them.

If you look at very popular esports such as Dota 2, League of Legends, CS:GO or Overwatch, women are a rarity and tier 1 competitions that involve teams of women are pretty much inexistent.

With VKLiooon’s success in the Hearthstone Global Finals, we may see at least a change in attitude toward women in esports. It’s still not very likely for them to be taken seriously by sponsors and tournament organizers, but if more of them show up and start to compete at a high enough level, more people will start to pay attention.

Comparison to Traditional Sports

Given the popularity of female competitions in sports like tennis, gymnastics, volleyball or handball, it’s quite obvious that people do in fact watch competitive events disputed between women, as long as the quality of those events is high enough. But that implies not just one solitary woman who’s the exception to the rule, but rather a decent amount of female competitors who are interested in an esports title and set out to master it.

By nature, competition seems to be in men’s blood. But we rarely attribute the desire to compete to women, even though they too are obviously engaged in that sort of thing both socially as well as professionally. And as we were saying earlier, traditional sports is already clear proof of women’s capacity and desire to be top performers in sports or esports for that matter. The only thing that needs to be done is to create opportunities for them, to find an audience that would enjoy watching them compete and then incentivize them to get more involved in esports. We're here to support #WomenInEsports.