To say that the video game Fortnite is doing well is like saying that the ocean has a bit of water in it. The cartoonish game that combines the popular battle royale genre with elements of Minecraft has been embraced by well over 200 million people.
Although the game is free to play developer Epic Games made $US3 billion dollars last year, and it's ready to splash that cash around, offering a total of $US100 million ($140 million) in prizes for Fortnite tournaments in 2019.
The Fortnite World Cup has a total prize pool of $US30 million.
When thoughts used to stray to big piles of prize money from esports, they tended to go straight to DOTA 2; the multiplayer online battle arena game that's basically a licence to print money for Valve.
While it’s nigh impossible to find accurate data on lifetime prize money in esports, DOTA 2 has awarded almost $US175 million from 1064 tournaments between August 2011 and February 2019, according to esportsearnings.com. That’s a huge amount of money, given that Counter Strike: Global Offensive, which is sitting in second place, has supposedly only given out around $US70 million over 3870 tournaments between March 2012 and February 2019.
Those comically large numbers over many years should give you enough perspective to know that Epic’s announcement that they have a $US100 million prize pool for Fortnite in 2019 is insane. That Scrooge McDuckian number, more than double the GDP of Tuvalu, will be split between weekly tournaments, regional tournaments and the World Cup.
Suddenly, letting your kids play Fortnite all day doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Assuming they're good enough to be in the top .0001 per cent or so of players globally.
The World Cup will start with weekly online qualifying tournaments between April 13 and June 16. These qualifying tournaments will offer weekly prize pools of $US1 million each.
The top 200 players — 100 solo and 50 teams of two — will then move on to the Fortnite World Cup Finals in New York at the end of July. Each player who makes it to the finals will get $US50,000 just for showing up, and the solo champion will get $US3 million, with the event having a total prize pool of $US30 million. To put that into perspective, the previous record for richest esports tournament was DOTA 2's International 2018, which offered roughly $US25 million.
Weekly tournaments will continue after the world cup but will be less focused on straight competition, offering a mix of standard battle royale and other game modes, and they'll continue to offer a $US1 million pool each.
Players have to be over the age of 13, and those under 17 need to have permission from a parent or guardian. But other than that, and the obvious need to have a good internet connection, players can be anyone from anywhere.
So, good luck.
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