PUBG Corp. has recently announced that it will host the first official eSports tournament for PlayerUnknown’s Battleground later this July. The tournament, the PUBG Global Invitational 2018, will take place in Berlin, Germany. It will pit twenty professional teams against one another for a reward of a lifetime: a two-million-dollar prize.
The tournament will be taking place in July 25-29. To qualify, teams will have to participate in regional tournaments that will be hosted in Asia, North America and Europe. Not a lot of information was given out about how the process would work. However what we do know is that, in the end, two teams will be selected as the world champions, one each for first-person and third-person perspective.
For those viewers out there who want to feel like their right over the champion’s shoulders as the event streams, you’re in luck. With PUBG’s in-game camera system, broadcasters will be able to zoom right in on the action and provide live commentary. PUBG Corp. also has a clever little feature up their sleeve: the server-side replay system. The feature allows PUBG Corp. to record entire matches in tremendous detail, parse the data for later viewing and overall greatly enhance the event experience.
This isn’t PUBG Corp’s first time in hosting a tournament. Just last year in Germany, August, did they run an event called Gamescom Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds Invitational. Yet, unlike this tournament, the prize money was only $350,000 – measly in comparison to the 2 million dollars up for grabs this time around.
Nonetheless, the Gamescom Invitational became so notable for two, significant reasons. The first being that PUBG introduced loot boxes prior to the event, drawing ire and critique from its fans at the event. The second was that PUBG received a shocking amount of views on the Chinese equivalent of Twitch, PandaTV, a popularity that has continued to evolve in China ever since.
