Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a former competitive gamer who’s widely regarded as the face of Fortnite Battle Royale, is hosting and competing in a unique tournament on the game on April 21st.
Working alongside Esports Arena, the event will take place in Las Vegas and has a fairly unusual format. With $50,000 (£35,157) on the line, Blevins will be putting $5,000 (£3,515.30) on the line in each of the 10 games. The money will go to the winner of each game, with $2,500 (£1,757.65) going to charity whenever Blevins takes first place. The other $2,500 from any game in which Blevins wins will roll over into the next match.
Further details, such as how to enter the event and the time in which it will start, are to follow. Either way, the concept of watching players face off against Blevins is exciting within itself, and it’ll be interesting to see how Fortnite plays in a competitive capacity.
Blevins broke records earlier in March when he streamed Fortnite on Twitch alongside popular rappers Drake and Travis Scott. He reached over 600,000 concurrent viewers on the platform, which topped the individual streaming record previously held by Dr. DisRespect.
Fortnite is yet to make a big move into esports, with small online tournaments being the only method of truly competing on the game thus far. Other Battle Royale games have seen varied levels of success as esports title so far, PUBG is steadily growing and H1Z1 has a Pro League on the way.
Esports Insider says: Fortnite is somewhat uncharted territory when it comes to competitive gaming, so it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. It’s great to see there’s a chance that a charity will benefit significantly from the event too.
