PUBG North American Esports League to start January 2019

Plans to build a brand new arena for esports events in California and a new North American Esports league hosted by PUBG Corp. have officially been confirmed. PUBG Corp. previously announced a five year PUBG esports plan that will see regional events take place across the globe. The new North American Esports League announcement will be the first steps towards initiating that plan.

Here is everything that was confirmed alongside the recent North America Esports League announcement.

© PUBG Corporation

New NPL League and California Arena are brave steps for PUBG

Let’s start off with the biggest news for players. The National PUBG League, or NPL for short, has been confirmed to start in January 2019. The NPL will have a $1 million prize pool and it will see three separate phases where 16 squads will compete on both Erangel and Miramar. The qualification requirements and tournament format will be announced at a later point. With a bit of quick maths, we can assume there will be a total of 48 qualified teams participating in the NPL. After the initial three phases, we can assume that a playoffs style event will take place.

The NPL will be the first of many regional events with gigantic prize pools. After the regional events, PUBG Corp. will host an international event each year, similar to the PUBG Global Invitational that happened in Berlin earlier in 2018.

Korean esports network OGN are teaming up with PUBG Corp. to help provide support and funding for the NPL. OGN will not only create live events and content for its network in Korea, but it will also run other events including the OGN Super League and the OGN Super Match Invitational. Most interestingly, OGN will be building a brand new arena from the ground up in California. The arena will seat up to 500 audience members and 100 players. With OGN essentially taking the helm, they will also be taking exclusive NPL streaming rights for platforms like Twitch and YouTube.

© PUBG Corporation

It’s common to see esports entities or tournament organizers take control of events for game developers, so the partnership with OGN should come as no surprise. The brand new arena is quite a headline, though. It paints a clear picture of the growth of esports. This particular partnership is especially interesting because it sees two South Korean companies teaming up together to pour a large investment into North American soil. In fact, OGN is investing a total of $100 million into North American esports broadcasting. No details have been given on whether this will go entirely to developing PUBG esports content, but we wouldn’t be surprised if OGN branches out to support more esports titles once the infrastructure is there.

What are your thoughts on this news? Do you think it’s good to see more investments from big names like OGN? Could the incredible esports hype in Asia spill over into the west to help esports grow globally?

In my opinion, these kinds of investments can only be a net positive for everybody in the industry. Regardless of whether you’re involved with PUBG or not, if you have anything to do with esports, this will be big news to you.