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Esports 'too violent' for Olympics

Popular titles focused on combat “cannot be brought into line with our Olympic values"

Esports 'too violent' for Olympics

The president of the International Olympic Committee doesn’t see esports coming to the games any time soon.

A former Olympic gold medallist himself, Thomas Bach claimed the violence inherent to many popular video games simply isn’t compatible with Olympic values.

Contrary to Olympic values

"We cannot have in the Olympic program a game which is promoting violence or discrimination," said Bach, speaking to the Associated Press during the 2018 Asian Games.

"They, from our point of view, are contradictory to the Olympic values and cannot, therefore, be accepted."

Now, at this point many might be thinking - what about fencing, or boxing? Both are Olympic sports, but both are by necessity violent actions. Bach made clear the distance between the “civilised expression” of violence in these sports, compared to games where killing is often the end-goal.

Our sister-site PCGamesInsider.biz has more on the story.


Staff Writer

Natalie Clayton is an Edinburgh-based freelance writer and game developer. Besides PCGamesInsider and Pocketgamer.biz, she's written across the games media landscape and was named in the 2018 GamesIndustry.biz 100 Rising Star list.