Turner Broadcasting and WME|IMG's joint venture ELeague announced a partnership with tournament organizer FACEIT July 22 to host a $300,000 Overwatch Open. Open qualifiers on FACEIT's online matchmaking platform begin July 23, with teams fighting for a chance to be one of the last eight standing in North America and Europe heading into the regional finals.
The regional finals of the tournament will be held on September 25-29 in the ELeague studios at Turner Broadcasting's home base in Atlanta, Georgia, and will be broadcasted live on streaming platform Twitch. The grand final of the tournament, which will take place on September 30, will be televised live on TBS, with the winner taking home $100,000 and the runner-up taking home $32,000.
"This opportunity to feature Blizzard's popular Overwatch further expands our esports offerings and aligns ELeague with a game that is widely embraced by the community," Turner Sports Chief Content Officer and EVP Craig Barry said in a news release. "We look forward to bringing the same level of production and storytelling capabilities we've demonstrated throughout the first season of ELeague to this championship event."
The announcement comes as ELeague's first season heads into its final week. For the past three months, ELeague has hosted the first televised CS:GO league in its studios in Atlanta. Its shows have averaged 261,625 viewers on TBS every Friday night, according to numbers released by SportsTVRatings.com.
The move to broadcast Overwatch should come as no surprise as Overwatch had seen massive interest even before its release in May. On June 14, the game's developer, Blizzard, announced that it had reached more than 10 million players across the globe. In South Korea, the game recently overtook the massively popular online game League of Legends as the game of choice in the country's ubiquitous internet cafes, with 35 percent of customers choosing to play Overwatch. This will be FACEIT's first time hosting Overwatch, and it will be the first of its competitors, including ESEA and CEVO, to do so.