You might look at mobile games and think of them as just something to pass the time while you’re bored on the train or in a waiting room. But what if one of those games became more than casual? Something competitive? Even become a full fledged esport?<\/span><\/p>\n
It might sound silly; a game you can simply play on your smartphone becoming competitive but esports is constantly evolving.\u00a0Vainglory<\/strong> is proof of that evolution, and has become the flagship for competitive mobile esports.<\/span><\/p>\n
We first saw Vainglory at the\u00a0Apple iPhone6 announcement in September 2014 as it was used to demonstrate the new Apple\u00a0graphics system. It was later released in November and in 2015 developers Super Evil Megacorp<\/strong> held the first World Invitational in South Korea with a prize pool of around $27,000 (\u00a322,251). <\/span><\/p>\n
Only a\u00a0year later competitive Vainglory progressed to a $120,000 (\u00a398,895) prize pool at the 2016 World Championship.<\/strong> Professional teams including the\u00a0likes of EchoFox, Misfits, NRG, Fnatic and many more have been signing Vainglory teams just in the few months of 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n
Vainglory isn’t the only mobile game to attempt to dip into esports but it has obviously had the most success. This begs the question, what makes it so special? Why is Vainglory now the flagship game for mobile esports?<\/span><\/p>\n
Obviously the first major differentiation is the fact that it is played 100% on touch screen with either a smartphone or tablet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Roamer for Team SoloMid, Michael ‘FlashX’ Valore<\/strong> told us in an earlier interview <\/a>that\u00a0the feel of using your fingers instead of a mouse and keyboard are totally\u00a0different: “I think Super Evil Megacorp really did a good job ensuring that Vainglory is incredibly responsive. It was a hard transition at first but after just a few games I started to really get the hang of it.”<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
You might look at mobile games and think of them as just something to pass the time while you’re bored on the train or in a waiting room. But what if one of those games became more than casual? Something competitive? Even become a full fledged esport? It might sound silly; a game you can … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4394,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","esi_template":"default","excluded":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,55,106,326,240,53,15109],"tags":[40,1488,1704,877,752,992,504,184,319],"class_list":["post-4054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-esports-titles","category-latest-news","category-mobile-esports","category-north-america","category-opinion","category-research","tag-esports","tag-latest-news","tag-moba","tag-mobile","tag-mobile-esports","tag-mobile-gaming","tag-super-evil-megacorp","tag-team-solomid","tag-vainglory"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n