In July 2024, during the Paris Olympics, the International Olympic Committee did something it had never done before: it voted to create an entirely new event, the Olympic Esports Games, and handed the hosting rights to Saudi Arabia in a 12-year partnership [source: IOC, 2024]. The first edition was supposed to happen in 2025. Then it slipped to 2027. Then, on 30 October 2025, the whole arrangement fell apart — the IOC and Saudi Arabia announced they were ending their cooperation entirely, just 14 months after signing it [source: IOC, 2025][source: Bloomberg, 2025].
So where does that leave the idea of an Olympic Games for video games? Very much alive as an ambition, but without a host, a date, or even a settled definition of what it is. The story of the Olympic Esports Games is a useful window into three genuinely hard questions the Olympic movement is still arguing over: what counts as a sport, who should be allowed to profit from the five rings, and how fast a century-old institution should chase a young digital audience. This piece walks through how the project got here, what actually happened, and what to watch next — separating what the IOC has decided from what it has only proposed.
From a virtual sideshow to a standalone Games
The IOC did not wake up one morning and invent an esports Olympics. It arrived there over several years of cautious experiments. The pivotal test came in June 2023, when the IOC staged the first Olympic Esports Week in Singapore [source: IOC, 2023]. Roughly half a million players entered online qualifiers, and 131 finalists competed in person across ten events [source: IOC, 2023].
What made that week revealing was not the turnout but the lineup. Every title was a sports simulation paired with the sport's international federation: cycling on Zwift, motor racing on Gran Turismo, archery, sailing, tennis, baseball, taekwondo, dance, chess, and a shooting event built on a targets-only mode of Fortnite [source: IOC, 2023]. Conspicuously absent were the games that actually dominate professional esports — Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Dota 2, Call of Duty, Valorant. The IOC was signaling, in effect, that "Olympic esports" would mean virtual versions of existing sports, not the commercial esports mainstream, and that it would keep its distance from violent or shooter titles on values grounds [source: IOC, 2023].
That experiment set up the bigger move. IOC President Thomas Bach had floated the idea at the 2023 Session in Mumbai [source: IOC, 2023], and at the 2024 Session in Paris the membership voted — unanimously — to create a standalone Olympic Esports Games [source: IOC, 2024]. "This is truly a new era for the IOC," Bach said. "With the confirmation by the IOC Session of the creation of the Olympic Esports Games, we are keeping up with the pace of the digital revolution" [source: IOC, 2024]. The framing was explicit: this was about meeting a young, digitally native audience where it already was.
The Saudi partnership — and its sudden collapse
The most consequential detail of the 2024 decision was the host. Rather than run the new event itself, the IOC signed a 12-year partnership with the National Olympic Committee of Saudi Arabia to stage the Games [source: IOC, 2024]. For a first-of-its-kind event with an uncertain business model, tying it to a well-funded, esports-hungry partner for over a decade looked like stability.
It did not last. In February 2025, the IOC pushed the inaugural edition from 2025 to 2027 in Riyadh, saying it needed more time to build the right structure and financial model for an event unlike anything in its portfolio; the Esports World Cup Foundation was brought in as a founding partner [source: IOC, 2025]. Then leadership changed. Kirsty Coventry succeeded Bach as IOC President in 2025 and launched a "Pause and Reflect" review of the organization's priorities, under which the esports project — along with its dedicated commission — was effectively put on hold [source: Xinhua, 2025].
The break came on 30 October 2025. The IOC and the Saudi Olympic and Paralympic Committee said they had "mutually agreed" to end their cooperation on the Olympic Esports Games and would pursue "their own Esports ambitions on separate paths" [source: IOC, 2025]. The two sides, together with the Esports World Cup Foundation, had "sat down again and reviewed this initiative" before parting [source: SCMP, 2025]. The IOC said it would now develop a new approach and a new partnership model, with the goal of holding the inaugural Games "as soon as possible" [source: IOC, 2025] — but it named no new host and no new date.
Coventry framed the split as a deliberate reset rather than a failure. "We jointly agreed that we needed to re-evaluate a number of things," she said in November 2025. "There is a huge opportunity, but there were question marks on how we would implement it and what would that look like… We have to be very clear because that's new territory for us" [source: Xinhua, 2025]. She also indicated the IOC was still debating a basic question — whether to limit participation to sports-themed games only [source: Xinhua, 2025]. It is worth being precise here: the IOC has publicly framed the exit as being about structure and fit, not about human rights, and the decision was described as mutual [source: IOC, 2025].
What even counts as an Olympic esport?
Underneath the logistics sits a definitional argument the IOC has never fully resolved: is competitive gaming a sport at all, and if so, which games qualify?
Critics point to physical exertion. By one common measure, seated video gameplay registers around 1.3–2.0 METs (a unit of metabolic effort), below the 3.0–5.9 METs range typically used to define moderate-intensity physical activity [source: Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2022]. On a traditional definition — sport as a structured contest of human physical skill — that gap is the whole objection.
Defenders answer that the Olympic program already includes disciplines where gross physical output is modest, such as shooting and equestrian, and that top esports demand real hand-eye coordination, fine motor precision, reaction speed, and sustained concentration [source: Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2022]. The comparison is contested, but it is not frivolous.
The harder problem is governance. A traditional sport is overseen by an independent international federation; a video game is owned by a publisher, which can patch, rebalance, or discontinue it at will [source: Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2022]. That single fact complicates everything the IOC values — stable rules, neutral officiating, long-term continuity — and it helps explain why the IOC leaned toward federation-backed sports simulations rather than publisher-controlled blockbusters. Coventry's open question about restricting the event to "sports-themed games only" is really this problem in another form [source: Xinhua, 2025].
For contrast, a more permissive model already exists next door. The Olympic Council of Asia made esports a full medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, with a lineup that included League of Legends, PUBG Mobile, Street Fighter, and EA Sports FC — mainstream and shooter titles the IOC has avoided — and esports returns at the 2026 Asian Games [source: Olympic Council of Asia, 2023]. Two of the biggest bodies in world sport have taken opposite approaches to the same medium.
The athletes: young careers, and who protects them
An Olympic event needs Olympic athletes, and here esports raises questions the IOC's existing rulebook does not neatly answer.
Professional esports careers tend to start young and end early. Elite players often log 12-to-16-hour practice days, and burnout-driven retirements in the early-to-mid twenties are common; the League of Legends star known as Uzi, for instance, retired at 23, citing health [source: Journal of Sports Sciences, 2024]. Peer-reviewed work has begun mapping the burnout profiles and compressed career arcs specific to competitive gaming, linking them to mental toughness, resilience, and the sheer intensity of the grind [source: Journal of Sports Sciences, 2024].
That creates real policy gaps for an Olympic context. What is the minimum age for an Olympic esports athlete, when many prodigies turn pro as teenagers? What practice-hour and welfare standards should apply? And crucially, who is responsible for player protection — an international federation, a game publisher, a team organization, or the IOC itself? Traditional Olympic sports have decades of athlete-welfare machinery; esports, governed largely by commercial actors, does not have an equivalent. None of this is disqualifying, but it is unfinished — and it is part of what the IOC means when it says it needs the right structure before it proceeds [source: IOC, 2025].
Sportswashing, soft power, and the money question
The Saudi element is impossible to separate from the wider debate, because the kingdom has become the single largest force in esports investment. Through Savvy Games Group, owned by its sovereign Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia announced a roughly $38 billion plan to turn itself into a global gaming and esports hub, acquiring major companies and staging the annual Esports World Cup in Riyadh [source: Savvy Games Group, 2022]. From that vantage, hosting an Olympic Esports Games was a natural capstone.
Human-rights groups see something else. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly argued that Saudi Arabia's sports spending amounts to "sportswashing" — using marquee events to soften international scrutiny of its record on free expression, the jailing of women's-rights activists, the death penalty, and the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi; Amnesty called FIFA's award of the 2034 men's World Cup to Saudi Arabia "blatant sportswashing" [source: Amnesty International, 2024][source: CNN, 2024]. On this view, the five rings would have lent the kingdom exactly the legitimacy critics say it is buying.
Both things can be described fairly at once. Saudi Arabia presents its gaming push as genuine economic diversification under its Vision 2030 program, aimed at a young population with real domestic fandom, not merely a public-relations exercise [source: Savvy Games Group, 2022]. The IOC, for its part, framed the partnership as a way to reach a global digital generation. And when the deal collapsed, the IOC described the reasons as structural and mutual rather than a repudiation of the host [source: IOC, 2025]. The point is not to declare a winner but to note that an Olympic esports event sits precisely where sport, money, and geopolitics now collide.
What to watch
The honest read in 2026 is that the Olympic Esports Games is an approved idea in search of a workable form. The IOC has decided to create it; it has not settled who will host it, when it will happen, or which games belong in it [source: IOC, 2025][source: Xinhua, 2025].
Three things will tell you whether it moves from ambition to reality. First, the new partnership and host model: whether the IOC finds a backer that satisfies both its finances and its values questions, after the Saudi arrangement showed how fragile a long-term host deal can be [source: IOC, 2025]. Second, the eligibility line: whether the IOC formally commits to federation-backed "sports-themed games only," or opens the door to the mainstream titles the Asian Games already embraces [source: Xinhua, 2025][source: Olympic Council of Asia, 2023]. Third, the athlete framework: whether age limits, welfare standards, and clear governance emerge before any Games is staged, rather than after [source: IOC, 2025].
For now, the smart posture is the IOC's own stated one — take the opportunity seriously, but move slowly, because this is new territory. An Olympic Games for gamers may still happen. In 2026, it remains a decision waiting for a design.