Epic’s first year of competitive Fortnite wrapped on Sunday with the World Cup in New York, but the developer has certainly been keeping busy. The battle royale hit’s tenth season launched just yesterday, and today the developer has released details about the title’s e-sports future. Starting August 17th, Epic will be hosting the Champion Series, a new online tournament circuit designed to replace its the season model it experimented with starting last summer.
The Champion Series will take place over five weeks with weekend tournaments, culminating in a three-day championship tournament starting September 21st that will crown seasonal winners from each world region. The initial mode will be trios, a never-before-seen team structure for official Fortnite tournaments. We don’t have a prize pool total yet, but Epic says “each event will have an independent prize pool,” and that “it all adds up to millions of dollars in prizes given away over the course of the first Fortnite Champion Series.”
This is a departure from the pop-up cups and skirmish series Epic used to get competitive Fortnite off the ground. The pop-up cups allowed anyone to compete for cash prizes, so long as they performed well enough in the game’s arena playlists and rose through the ranks. The skirmish series was similar to an invitational setup, and it brought both unknown players from the game’s competitive scene and established e-sports pros to compete in live, LAN tournaments for sizable cash prizes.
Epic looks to be focusing its efforts now on a simpler setup, and that’s resulting in the Champion Series. “This in-game tournament series will have a persistent leaderboard where players can track their progress towards becoming the Seasonal Champion in each of the server regions,” Epic says. The studio will also run single-day solo tournaments with cash prizes on Wednesdays and Thursdays of every week of the series, restricted based on your arena level, as well as trio cups starting August 23rd.
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Source: Theverge
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