WePlay Ultimate Fighting League set to boost competitive MK11 and Tekken 7

WePlay Esports are one of the biggest organizer around for fighting games. Over the last year they’ve been one of few organization to manage to hold an in-person fighting games tournament. They’ve just announced what’s coming next for them, and for the entire genre. The WePlay Ultimate Fighting League has been announced to be taking place over March and April. The event spans a few different games in the fighting esports world. It brings a big prize pool, and importantly some in-person fights with the responsiveness that comes along with it. 

The tournament follows on from WePlay’s previous fighting tournaments like the Dragon Temple run last December. This new event is running in a similar format to the Dragon Temple, but considerably scaled up. It’s got a bigger prize pool and it is covering three games instead of one. WePlay has previously hosted major Dota 2 and CS GO events. Their increasing presence in fighting games bodes well for the development of a bigger scene for these games. This is everything that’s going down:

© WePlay

WePlay Ultimate Fighting League

The WePlay Ultimate Fighting League covers three different games this time around. They’ll be taking place at different times however, with tournaments running over subsequent weekends.

While WePlay just hosted a Mortal Kombat tournament, and now another two games are getting added to the lot. These games are popular as fighting games but haven’t had any many tournaments over the last year as some others. Each tournament is taking place one weekend after another, taking the League through the early months of Spring. Each of the tournaments is also going to have a $50,000 prize pool, totaling $150,000 on offer overall.

The WePlay Ultimate Fighting League is going to be held in-person at the WePlay Esports Arena in Kyiv. This makes a big difference for fighting games. These are events where plays depend on single frames to perfectly time their attacks, so avoiding playing over a great distance is always a bonus.

The current roster of players is yet to be announced. WePlay has stated that the participants will be selected only via invites. Additionally, due to the event being LAN we expect the organizers are scouting which players can make the trip given global travel restrictions.

“Due to the current state of the world and the safety precautions we created, we have each title as a 16 player invite-only tournament. The top players from each event will stay, and we will then hold open qualifiers worldwide with slots for each season going forward. – James Banks, WePlay Esports

We can probably expect to see some of the same faces from previous WePlay Tournaments in attendance. 

WePlay’s big push into Fighting Games

The WePlay Ultimate Fighting League is part of an ongoing push to develop more events for fighting games. WePlay has recently seen some major investment. They received $25 million to operate this fighting League, with part of the money coming from WePlay and part from boxer Oleksandr Usyk. Oleksandr is also becoming the face of the entire League in most promotional activities. The size of the investment should help ensure a lengthy run of fighting game events.

Interestingly, Soulcalibur took the cake in a recent pool about which games of the three deserves the hype.

In the end, WePlay Fighting tournaments are becoming more commonplace following the success of the recent Mortal Kombat exclusive event back in December.  If the the success of previous events is anything to go by, the WePlay Fighting League is going to be one of the bigger events fighting games we have seen in a while.

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