Esport News

Fortnite announce plan & cancel World Cup

Epic Games have announced their competitive plan for 2021, which involves more of a Trio (three person) format and cancelling all in-person tournaments which include the World Cup. Although Fortnite got off to a slow start in 2020 when it comes to tournaments, they made up for it in the second half of the year pushing esports organisations to re-invest in their Fortnite rosters. However, we will not see this inconsistent pattern in 2021, as Epic Games have already planned out their tournaments, starting with the Trios format. Trios is widely considered to be the most entertaining and competitive format for Fortnite tournaments. Trios FNCS will be spread out through the whole year of 2021, starting with the Season 5 FNCS on February 4. Every season will take its own trios tournament this year, the usual amount of Fortnite seasons every year is about 3 so we should look at 3 separate Trios FNCS tournaments.

In unfortunate news, the Fortnite World Cup 2021 has been cancelled with Covid-19 continuing to affect global travel and limit in-person events. The World Cup was announced before Covid-19 had hit and has taken a rather huge toll. Despite the World Cup being cancelled, Epic has announced that they are committed to competitive Fortnite including the Trios tournaments, weekly tournaments, new unique tournaments and Creator Cups throughout the year.

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Dota break record for largest prize pool in esport history

This year's Dota International has broken the record for the largest prize pool in esports history at a whopping $35,000,000. Although this is quite usual for Dota as they seem to increase the prize pool every year... But you may be wondering where does all this money come from? Dota 2's International is the game's World Cup, professional gamers have won more playing Dota 2 than they have in CS:GO, Overwatch, Fortnite and League of Legends combined, and this prize pool is all in one tournament! The answer to why they can have such a high stake is due to crowdfunding. With every International since 2013, Valve (company who own Dota 2) have released a companion guide alongside it, an in-game app called the Compendium. The first iteration costs $10, and 25% of profits go towards that year's International prize pool. As time went on, the compendium grew, with more items added for example loot boxes with random draws for cosmetics of extreme rarity. Every year these new items found new ways to earn them and consequently found new outlets for cash to flow. The modern Compendium lets you buy levels for upgrades, unlocking items as you progress higher. These levels can be earned by simply playing the games, but people are impatient and would rather just to give a boat load of cash to earn these levels funding their International's.

The money just keeps increasing, requiring significant investment of either money or time to get all the best stuff, tons of cosmetics are released, new modifications, new items and for every transaction for one of these 25% goes towards the prize pool. Each tournament has an initial investment of $1.6 mil from valve to over $35,000,000 depending on how the professionals do, encouraging users to add to the prize pool themselves. The 2019-2020 competitive season took a new shape whereby you can qualify for the International through face-offs in tournaments that are team based featuring 5 Majors and 5 Minors that all offer points to determine the twelve invites to The International.