Ready? Fight! Capcom partners with Twitch for year-round Street Fighter league

Twitch and Capcom are gonna tag-team this whole fighting-game-community thing.

The two companies are working together to create the Capcom Pro Tour. This is a Street Fighter gaming league win which players will face off against one another in tournaments around the world. Twitch will broadcast the competitions live on its website. The tour comprises 10 premier regionals that will all lead into the Capcom Cup in December. It will start with Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition and then add Ultra Street Fighter IV once that version debuts in June. Capcom is putting up the money for the tournament, but it has not announced the size of the prize pool.

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“The fighting community has always been a huge part of the world of competitive gaming, but has lacked global leagues and structure which other e-sports communities have benefited greatly from,” Twitch fighting-game specialist Victor “Victheslik” Denchartphan said in a statement. “What Capcom is setting out to achieve by organizing a year-long pro tour in tandem with leveraging the Twitch community is definitely going to change the face of the fighting game scene.”

The Capcom Cup will welcome the top 16 gamers as determined by the premier events as well as separate ranking events organized independently of the Capcom Pro Tour.

Here are the announced CPT stops for this year:

• Final Round: March 14 to March 16 in Atlanta
• NorCal Regionals: April 18 to April 20 in Sacramento, Calif.
• Southeast Asia Majors: June 20 to June 22 in Singapore
• Community Effort Orlando: June 27 to June 29 in Orlando, Fla.
• Evolution Championship Series: July 11 to July 13 in Las Vegas
• The Fall Classic: Oct. 10 to Oct. 12 in Raleigh, N.C.
• DreamHack Winter: Nov. 27 to Nov. 30 in Sweden

Fighting games, and Street Fighter in particular, make for popular e-sports. By organizing with Twitch and bringing various independent events under one league, Capcom can potentially draw a large audience of viewers to its products. This will not only entertain fans of Street Fighter, it will also act as a marketing tool for Capcom.

Twitch is now a popular avenue for marketing. The site has more than 40 million monthly unique viewers. Other companies, like Activision, have employed similar strategies to the Capcom Pro Tour. For the second year in a row, the Call of Duty publisher is holding a $1 million tournament with e-sports association Major League Gaming for its latest release in that shooter franchise.

These kinds tournaments attract a dedicated and engaged audience that will feel more connected with each other and the game.