Winning $30,000 for playing a game of Tekken may sound too good to be true but Bandai Namco says the prize money awaits best players who will outrank the competition.
Partnering with Wizard World Con, the Japanese game publisher Bandai Namco announced that they will be hosting a competitive Tekken 7 tournament called The King of Iron Fist. Physical arenas will be set up across 16 cities in North America and the free tournament will be open for anyone who is brave enough to join.
The mechanics of the tournament is pretty straightforward. According to Bandai, the winner of each tour stop will face each other for a final battle, and fight for a slice of the $30,000 prize pool. It has not been disclosed yet how the money will be split but it is more likely that the top-ranking players will get a larger portion of the pie.
Tekken 7 is a one-on-one fighting game developed and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It is the ninth installment in the popular Tekken series and the first to adopt Unreal Engine, one of the latest portable tools being explored by game developers. Tekken has been closely associated with the PlayStation brand because of its long history of running exclusively on PlayStation hardware consoles. The game had a limited arcade release in Japan on February 2015 and is yet to reveal a release date for PS4, although Bandai says it is in the works.
The Tekken franchise has sold more than 44 million game units, with Tekken 3 hailed as its most successful series to date, selling more than 1.4 million copies in Japan alone, and more than 8.3 million worldwide. Bandai hopes that by launching open tournaments in North America, they can capture a larger market in the region, as well as make Tekken 7 more accessible to the masses.
A Bandai Namco staff, Mark Julio earlier tweeted that the arcade version of Tekken 7 will be used in the tournament. The game organizers however, plan on switching to the PS4 version, once the game is released. Bandai Namco is yet to confirm this report but promised to share more updates about the upcoming King of Iron Fist Tournament in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
