Online Gaming Tournament to be Set Up by Ronnie Screwvala and Nazara Games
With online gaming leagues becoming quite common in India, an investment of Rs 136 crore has been committed by Nazara Games for an eSports venture along with Rs 80-100 crore investment by Ronnie Screwvala for setting up a tournament.
Till a few years back, online games were common in households and neighbourhood cafes however, local gaming tournaments are now earning big bucks with winners getting huge sums of money.
The eSports league of Nazara Games will allow online gamers hooked on to games like League of Legends and Dota 2 to participate in tournaments, chat of forums as well as catch live webtv programmes. The investment by the Mumbai-based company will continue over 5 years.
Nazara Games Chief Executive, Manish Agarwal stated that, per year the league will have 2 seasons and 6 teams will be selected through free online qualifier tournaments which will focus mainly on games like Counter Strike, Dota and League of Legends. He also added that, for mid-core and hard-core gamers there wasn’t an offering so this offering will meet this set of gamers.
Apart from domestic startups like, eGamers Arena, Nodwin Gaming and Nova Gaming Ventures, international players such as ESL are also investing to setup national level tournaments in the country every month. At present, 3 to 4 online and offline tournaments take place in India, once a week.
eGamers Arena has partnered with the largest gaming championship worldwide, World Cyber Arena to host the national qualifiers in India for a championship that will be held by the end of 2017 in China. Winners of online games like Overwatch and Counter Strike will get a prize of $28 million.
