First official Fortnite tournament arrives – Epic opens $100 million war chest

It’s no secret that Fortnite, the most played game in the world at the moment, is making it’s creators millions practically every day. Epic Games, the owners of Unreal Tournament and the Unreal engine are more or less swimming in money thanks to Fortnite.

The spin-off of their unpopular Save the World game ended up becoming a breakout hit and fans have been asking for a ‘proper’ esports version for a long time. Once, Fortnite came close and offered a solo competition that rewarded the top 50 players quite handsomely, but that was it – fans hopes for a tournament weren’t answered.

Until now that is. Epic has just revealed that it will in fact (finally) host a proper tournament for the game. Of its total $100 or so million, Epic is putting up a pretty spectacular $8 million as the grand prize for the tournament. The rest of those $100 million is also earmarked for tournaments – as it’s very, very likely that this one will do well, Epic will use the rest on future tournaments.

$8 million is already a pretty respectable amount and considering that this will be the first Fortnite tournament, it’s even more remarkable – generally speaking, winning prizes tend to start small and then increase in subsequent tournaments.

According to Epic, invitations have already been sent out for the tournament. The competitors will be made up of community and Fortnite players. In spirit with the ever-popular limited time modes, the format of the tournament will change on a weekly basis. This means that in the 8-week series of the competition, no week will be the same. The competitors will change too, along with the format of the game.

The very first competition win is a Duos-style game, and the prize money for this alone is $250.000. While not all players have been confirmed, some have already accepted the invitations they received. These include OpTic Gaming content creator Jack ‘CouRage’ Dunlop and OpTic pro ‘BaldyKun’, Twitch streamer Valkrae, Team Liquid pro players ‘Chaps’ and ’72hrs’ and more.

This will be the first competition that is completely open and will let players keep their winnings – in addition to the solo trial that Epic ran earlier this year, they also trialled a short tournament at E3, where celebs and pro gamers battled it out for a $3 million prize – a charity prize that is.

Even for that event, fan interest was spectacular. A stadium was filled for the final of the competition and the record for concurrent viewers of the Twitch stream was a staggering 700.000 viewers. Including view parties and the like, the number of actual viewers was likely even higher – not bad for a first try.

It’s hard to predict exactly how popular this first ‘real’ tournament will be, but if first reactions are anything to go by, it’ll definitely be big. This new announcement arrived together with season 5 of Fortnite – much anticipated and speculated about, Epic really knows how to pile on the good news!

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