PlayStation tournaments are now a thing. In a recent announcement PlayStation revealed that they have partnered with ESL to form tournaments featuring "games gamers want to play" which sounds like, well, games.

These tournaments will be held online, not at all unlike the tournaments hosted on Vizzed, so contestants will be playing from the comfort and convenience of their own homes rather than being forced to drive or fly across the country to compete. Best of all, the top three players in a given tournament will receive prizes, though no mention of a cash prize was mentioned, at the moment it appears that the prizes will all be PlayStation gear of some sort (such as a Dualshock 4 or perhaps a headset and the like).

The announcement also indicated that in order to compete you will need the following:
•A copy of the game in question
•A PlayStation 4
•A PS+ membership
•An internet connection capable of online multiplayer
•An ESL account

Not all of these were listed explicitly, but those that weren't were implied (obviously you need a connection). And yes, this is specifically a PS4 feature, so PS Vita and PS3 gamers are left out, sorry.

The announcement further stated that the tournaments will utilize the events feature and matches will be added to your events calendar, also your PlayStation 4 will prompt you when it's time for your match.

Additionally all tournaments for now are one on one matches, but they were noticeably careful to say they would be 1v1 "initially" and that they would "continue to enhance the feature in the future".

Finally the first "Major Tournament" begins the 27th of this month (October) and ends the 27th of next month and "Major Cup rounds" will take place every Saturday. Though why the words "Major Tournament" were employed is beyond me at this point, but it would seem to imply that there will be different degrees to these tournaments, which would be preferable as it would allow for more games to have their own tournaments.

The first game will be NBA 2K17 "to celebrate the beginning of the NBA season".


What do you think of this announcement? Will you be participating in any of the tournaments?




All quotes were taken from PlayStation.blog

I actually am pretty interested to see what kind of tournaments will be held.

With it being NBA 2k17, it's not a big deal, because they did something similar last year, on the dev side of things, rather than the system's side of things.

With Playstation making the move, recently, to embracing sharing content more, and now to competitive gaming, I think Playstation is going to end up THE place for core-gamers.