Blizzard is putting some serious money on the line for the future of competitive Hearthstone.
The first event of the 2016 Hearthstone Championship Tour will kickoff tomorrow at Dreamhack Winter in Sweden. This will lead into a season that will last months before culminating in the Hearthstone World Championship, where competitors will have a crack at a $1 million prize pool. That is four times the $250,000 Blizzard put up for the 2015 Hearthstone championship. This signifies that Hearthstone, a free-to-play card battler for PC, Mac, and mobile, is establishing a healthy esports scene. This makes Hearthstone only the eighth video game ever to have a single event with a seven-digit dollar amount up for grabs, according to website Esports Earnings. This signifies that Activision Blizzard, which has previously put up $1 million for four separate different Call of Duty tournaments, sees esports as a key strategy in maintaining Hearthstone’s momentum.
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If all this gets you excited as a Hearthstone player, that’s exactly the intended effect. Blizzard wants to raise the profile of competitive Hearthstone so that will encourage more players to spend money on card packs, arena runs, and the single-player adventures. But if that motivation results in more entertaining livestream esports events, then that’s a win for all Hearthstone fans.
With that amount of money in the balance, Blizzard clearly wants to stoke the fire in the hearth. That’s why 2016 isn’t only about more money — although, in addition to the $1 million for the finals, the company will have $100,000 on the line for each of the nine Season Championships in the various world regions.
The Tour will feature more tournaments to ensure a wider selection of competitors. The Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions will each get three Season Championships as well as one invitational tournament. Blizzard is also eliminating “instant byes,” which previously enabled certain invited players to skip ahead to later rounds of big tournaments. These players will still get invites, but they’ll have to start alongside everyone else.
Competitions are also getting more formats and more opportunities for players and fans to participate. For the former, expect to see more events using different rules like the 9-deck match variants and Last Hero Standing. For the latter, expect Blizzard to throw more Fireside Gatherings in more places to enable a wider selection of people to work their way from the preliminaries into the Season Championships and beyond.