PUBG Corp. announced the first ever official tournament for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Mobile today. The PUBG Mobile Star Challenge is a global event with pro gamers, internet personalities, and celebrities competing for prizes. The final champion of the tournament will win $200,000.
PUBG Mobile Star Challenge will see the top 20 teams from each region move to regional finals, and then global finals. Over 15,000 teams applied to be in the tournament. The regions are China, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Japan/Korea. Each regional champion will win $20,000 before moving to the global finals. Winners of each region will become the “official streamer for the region” and access to “promotional resources for streaming” the game and gain various exclusive in-game items.
The global tournament champion will win $200,000, the runner-up $100,000, and third-place will receive $50,000. Each regional winner will receive $20,000, second place will get $15,000, and $10,000 to third place. Finally the most popular player in each regional final will get $10,000 as well. Exactly how the “most popular player” will be chosen have not been detailed.
PUBG Mobile is a standalone mobile version if PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The mobile release came in the first quarter of 2018, and is a free-to-play version of the popular battle royale game. Since PUBG Mobile‘s launch it has been playing catch-up with it’s PC and Xbox big brother. The game added a first-person mode in June, and got the latest map—Sanhok—three months after the PC version of PUBG.
PUBG and PUBG Mobile have been quickly outpaced by Fortnite: Battle Royale since it launched in September 2017. Unlike Fortnite the mobile version of PUBG features different progression and no cross-platform play. While Fortnite has outstripped its competitors, PUBG still has hundreds of thousands of players every day across the multiple iterations of the game.
According to PUBG Corp. and parent company Tencent Games participant registration has already ended, and the first regional final begins in Europe in September 29.