Update: The tournament is starting soon, so we’re bumping the post.
Blizzard has just announced that the first Duels tournament, named “Darkmoon Duel-Fest” will take place next week. It will be (just like always when it comes to those first tournaments) an invitational, with 24 prominent Hearthstone content creators battling for their share of $200,000 prize pool.
You can watch it on Twitch or YouTube. Tournament will start on November 24th at 10 AM PT (19:00 CET) and last for roughly 6 hours. Learn more about the participants, casters and the format in the official blog post below:
We’re excited to announce our first ever Duels tournament, Darkmoon Duel-Fest! 24 of your favorite Hearthstone creators will compete for a piece of a $200,000 prize pool on November 24, from 10:00 a.m. PT to 4:00 p.m. PT on Twitch.tv/PlayHearthstone, YouTube.com/Hearthstone, and their own respective channels!
Darkmoon Duel-Fest will utilize a brand-new format we’re calling Last Duelist Standing. In this format, competitors play through 3 closed-circuit Duels runs until either one player remains, or one or more players reach 12 wins. Players are awarded 10 points for game win, and once a player loses 3 times they are out for that run. After the 3 full runs are completed, individual scores from each run are combined to make a player’s final score. These final scores will be the decider for the event’s results and prize pool, and additional prizing can be earned for being the “Last Duelist Standing” of each run!
Who will earn the title of Last Duelist Standing? Join us at Twitch.tv/PlayHearthstone or YouTube.com/Hearthstone on November 24 to find out. We’ll see you in the chat!
any information about drops ?
Waste of perfectly good esports money
Couldn’t have said it better!
its called marketing
Just so you know, it’s 100% not esports money, it’s marketing / advertisement money. A small competitive tournament would never had such high stakes. E.g. the latest Blizzard-sanctioned EMEA Cup for BG had $10k prize pool. $200k is more comparable with big-time events like Masters Tour (which has $250k base prize pool), and then it’s spread over hundreds of participants.
Instead of directly paying those popular content creators to advertise the new mode, they do it in a form of a tournament. That’s what they’ve been doing for a while.
Not sure if that will make you feel better or worse, but that’s how it is. Marketing always has much more money than esports.
Ok but really do you think the prize money is increasing marketing/viewership somehow? I don’t buy that.
I guess then you’ll say the players won’t play for free ok
That’s the point – prize money is not increasing viewership (at least not by a lot), but if it wasn’t there, people like Kripp, Thijs, Dog, Kibler etc. wouldn’t be interested in participating. Those popular streamers are usually paid for advertisting something – it’s a part of their job, after all.
So there are two options to approach this. 1 – small money prize + paying the streamers behind the scenes. And 2 – big money prize. Second option is much better for the marketing (because you can advertise it as a big, $200k tournament), but for streamers it doesn’t really matter, because they get their money either way.
Blizzard spends a lot of money on these tournaments which is indirectly marketing and advertising the game. These costs must be passed on to the consumer because at the end of the day because Blizzard is out to make a profit and they wouldn’t be charitable and give out money at a tournament. Now, just imagine that instead of spending on this kind of marketing, they passed on the cost savings to the consumer in the form of more packs per dollar, more XP and more rewards in the rewards track. I think more people would stick with Hearthstone.