EPIC GAMES Giving $100 Million For Fortnite eSports Prize Pool

Battle Royale is huge right now as people love how the genera blends the scavenging elements of a survival game with last man standing gameplay. Fortnite, H1Z1 and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) are the leading Battle Royale titles right now with Fortnite having roughly 45 million players and over 3 million concurrent users. The number of gamers playing these titles is staggering and eSports is blowing up.

Epic Games is looking to keep the momentum going and has announced that they will provide $100,000,000 to fund prize pools for Fortnite competitions in the 2018 – 2019 season. Not much is known about these competitions, but Epic Games said that they are planning to take a different approach to competitive play and be more inclusive, and focused on the joy of playing and watching the game”.

This dwarfs the 100 million Chinese yuan ($15.75 million) investment into Fortnite eSports made by Tencent in China back in April 2018, but shows that money is pouring into eSports. Keep in mind that Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games,which is of course the maker of Fortnite. Tencent also owns part of Tesla, Snap, and Activision Blizzard. First-quarter revenue for Tencent was massive as it jumped nearly 50% to $12 billion with $3.65 billion in profit. Research group SuperData believes that Fortnite alone rang up sales of $223 million in March 2018, which is mighty impressive considering it is free-to-play game title.

The $100 million prize pool announced by EPIC Games for Fortnite would make it the largest ever for a single game titles prize pool for a single year. We looked around and in 2017 Valve’s Dota 2 prize pool was just shy of $25 million 2017 with an all time total prize pool of just over $105 million. EPIC Games will be contributing $100 million, so it will be interesting to see what the contributed prize pool will be from everyone. We also can’t wait to see how Fortnite will enter the competitive play scene in the months ahead.