Twitch Streamers Blocked from Warzone Rebirth Tournament

Call of Duty
March 25, 2022
Jordan Ashley

Warzone has a healthy competitive ecosystem and a strong following across numerous gaming platforms. However, those two factors clashed this week with the Warzone Rebirth Tournament. This is an ‘open’ tournament featuring a $100K prize pool. The big problem though? Organizers have made it a YouTube-only tournament.

Some streamers and players on other platforms have taken issue with this and claimed they’ve been blocked from entering a supposedly open tournament.

COD Warzone Rebirth

Warzone Rebirth Tournament

The Warzone Rebirth Island tournament is going to be an event with an ‘open’ format, meaning anyone from regular players to pros can compete. The tournament is going to be taking place on Rebirth Island, now that the map has had a major update. The tournament is due to start April 5th and run through to April 24th. The event is going to be running between Stage Two and Stage Three of the CDL, so this is going to have a big audience

The event is taking place in the North American region, open to players over 18. The tournament has a playlist that teams can play in prior to it starting. The top 40 that perform well will qualify. A bracket will then be held from April 11th to April 15th. The top four teams will move forward to the finals where they face teams from the Call of Duty League.

This is a different kind of format; it involves all areas of Call of duty esports. With CDL pros competing, things like CoD betting will be hard to call. However, it does look like the pool of players to qualify through Warzone might be slightly smaller than some anticipated. The exact rules of qualification limit players to YouTube, which hasn’t gone down well with streamers.

Twitch Streamers Excluded from Open Tournament

This is a tournament that pits the best of Warzone against the top CDL teams. That made it an attractive offer for Warzone streamers who often play at the high end of the game and are major parts of Warzone tournaments. The rules for the Warzone Rebirth tournament don’t allow players to take part off of YouTube, which causes a bit of a problem.

The rules make it clear that players have to be able to stream their gameplay on YouTube. For most people this is simple. However, YouTube and Twitch have exclusivity deals for some streamers. This makes them contractually unable to stream on YouTube. Since they have to be able to do this to even take part, this keeps a lot of streamers out of an open tournament entirely.

 

These rules are definitely going to limit things for who takes part in the tournament. Although, there’s still a decent line-up between YouTube players and CDL teams. Hopefully, these formats won’t be a permanent change to Warzone tournaments, keeping ‘open’ tournaments actually open in the future. Although for one tournament, this could be a good opportunity for new YouTube-specific talent in Warzone to grow.