Motorola of Sweden and ESL Nordic announced their partnership in hosting a $10,000 (£7,655) mobile esports tournament called MSPORT NATIONALS.
The tournament will feature Hearthstone, Power Rangers: Legacy Wars and Modern Combat 5 and will take place at DreamHack Winter on December 3rd. Four qualifiers will be held on ESL Play, ESL’s online tournament platform, sometime in November.
The MSPORT NATIONALS tournament will also be used as platform to show off the new Moto Gamepad, “a device that adds an analog d-pad, joysticks, and face buttons to smartphones for ease of use.”
“Smartphones are becoming increasingly powerful, making them eligible even as a gaming platform,” Joakim Liljedahl, Nordic Marketing Manager for Motorola at Lenovo said. “I truly believe that Moto Z2 Force, in combination with Moto Gamepad, makes out the best mobile gaming experience in the world.”
Earlier this week, OnePlus partnered with Fnatic and Razer announced the release of their brand new smartphone so it’s a pretty big week for mobile esports. It is fairly strange, however, that ESL would include games such as Power Rangers and Modern Combat but ignore titles like Vainglory and Clash Royale which have arguably considerably bigger fan bases.
Esports Insider says: This is significant for the growth of mobile esports for a well-known telecom company such as Motorola to actively get involved in tournament hosting with a company with as large of a foothold in the industry as ESL.