Your giant-robot-piloting skills can finally earn you cash.
Developer Piranha Studios announced this past weekend that it is planning a MechWarrior Online World Championship series in 2016. The competition, and its $100,000 prize purse, should attract some of the MechWarrior community’s best players. This announcement comes as the free-to-play mech battler goes live on Steam for the first time, and Piranha looks to bring in new players. Esports has turned into one of the most common ways to promote a game and get players excited about it, and that’s especially true for games that are free to download and play on PC.
Competitive gaming has now had more than 250 tournaments with a prize pool of at least $100,000. We’ve seen games like World of Tanks, Heroes of the Storm, and Counter-Strike hold events for that amount of money. And it seems like and more and more developers will use this kind of event to keep its players engaged.
As part of the announcement, Piranha released a trailer for the tournament:
With this tournament and Steam release, MechWarrior Online is getting a second chance to win over gamers. It originally debuted for PC in 2013 under Infinite Game Publishing, but it never found a huge audience to support its free-to-play business model. That led to developer Piranha buying the publishing rights from Infinite in September 2014.
All of that led up to MechWarrior’s release on Steam last Friday. Piranha has worked to ensure the game is more friendly to newcomers with an improved tutorial along with an updated interface and voice-communication support.