Are mobile esports the new/next big thing?

The backlash that Blizzard endured after their Diablo Immortal announcement fueled the never-ending debate about mobile gaming, and as an extension of it, mobile esports. We have witnessed the birth and rise of the mobile platform as a serious contender in esports events, even though it is still considered as inferior by many. But nowadays, those mobile devices that follow us along everywhere we go are pure technology condensed, and video game editors would be foolish not to make good use of this new platform.
Especially considering that mobile gaming now represents the majority of the global video games market, with 51% of the expected $137.9 Bn to be made in 2018 (Source: Newzoo).

We have seen games adapted to fit the phones, with Fortnite, PUBG and Hearthstone coming to mind immediately, and some native mobile games like Clash Royale grab a fair share of the attention lately, with online tournaments, official pro circuits and LAN events offering cash prizes that have nothing to be ashamed of in comparison to some of the big names of the industry.

ESWC PGW 2018 – Samsung Fortnite Mobile Tournament

And it’s not just about the professionals, these games present the huge advantage of being easily available, and playable by everyone, so there is no wonder that they represent a non-negligible part of the community tournaments organized this year. Fortnite, of course, leads the way, and its cross-platform gameplay makes it difficult to exactly know the portion of players enjoying the game on a mobile device, but things get clearer when you look at PUBG Mobile and Clash Royale, two games that are exclusive to mobile, and that have seen an incredible rise in numbers this year (on Toornament, PUBG Mobile went from not existing to Top 2 in just 6 months, only outdistanced by Fortnite!).

So that would be an understatement to say that we do believe in mobile gaming and mobile esports, given that ultimately, the players are the one making the calls, and it’s pretty obvious that the platform matters less than the quality of the game!

Use Case: Riot Games organizes the French Collegiate League with Toornament!

Riot Games is launching La Grosse Ligue (the Big League), the French League of Legends Collegiate League.
The League is built around the 12 French regions, with three tournaments per region, where teams are seeded based on their in-game rank. Each of the three Tiers (Baron, Dragon and Herald) boasts a different structure, that also depends on the number of participating teams in the region.

Here are all of the Grosse Ligue tournaments:

To accomplish this, Riot Games chose to trust Toornament for our wide array of structures, and flexibility of our points system to accommodate their specific rules. We built a custom registration tool for teams to apply and provide scholarship certification, and more than 500 teams across the country answered the call. The teams were then imported in their respective tournaments using the Toornament API.

Thanks to the integration with the League of Legends Tournament Codes, the matches can now be played seamlessly by the players, with results automatically reported to the platform.

“Our goal at Riot Games France is to create local solutions that resonate with the French audience, and given France’s complex tertiary educational system, we needed to create a highly modular and flexible tournament system to answer those needs. We entered into the production stage with some trepidation, as we believed that implementing the format was not something that was easy to solve.
However, Toornament was able to provide the perfect product that we were looking for to create an amazing tournament experience for French university students.”
– Howon Lee, Esports Lead at Riot Games

The first matches were held on the 7th of November, and the League is bound to last several weeks, where the competition will move to the national level, with the best teams competing for prizes against the best teams from the other regions.

Here is the trailer for the competition:

Find all results on Toornament, and on the Grosse Ligue official website!

New tournament creation interface

We want to make the tournament creation and configuration process as quick and easy as possible for our organizers.
To that end, we today update the tournament creation process, by making it a single page with advanced and smart fields, so creating a tournament is faster and easier than ever! Indeed, the suggested games now depend on your own history of tournament creation, so if you are a true fan of a game, you will see it pop first in the list!

That follows the previous update to the Organizer Dashboard which became more user-friendly, to guide you through all stages of your tournament configuration, while putting the important features forward.

Go ahead and try it out, and as always, let us know what you think about it!

New structure widgets are available!

Tournaments organized on Toornament.com all come with a set of Widgets, for organizers to share their tournament information easily on any website.
Until now, available widgets were as follow:

  • Registration
  • Tournament
  • Schedule
  • Stage

We have drastically increased the number of widgets available, by adding all levels of structure to the widgets that you may now use. Indeed, you can now not only display a stage in a widget, but also a group, a round, a match or even a single game!

Group Widget – League of Legends Worlds 2018, Play-In Group Stage

Match Widget – FaceIT Major London 2018 Grand finals

FFA Game Widget – Fortnite Royal Rumble All Stars

These widgets will let you display what you deem the most interesting or important about your tournament, or share individual matches with your press services or other partners
To learn more about these new widgets, and how to use them, see our Widget Guide on the Help Center!

Toornament starts its localization project!

Democratization of esports means that more and more people get into it, and we want to make sure that Toornament, the most advanced technology for esports, is easily available to the majority of esports enthusiasts. This goes through providing an interface in several languages, and thus, we are starting a project to translate our whole environment.

First step will be to make the platform available in these languages:

  • French
  • German
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish

… with many more to come!

To that end, we want to call upon our amazing community’s knowledge, to create a foolproof Glossary of the technical terms used on the platform, so if you want to take part in this project with us, learn more about it in our Help Center article.