The summer months might not be great in terms of releases, but there are plenty of different events for which players can get excited.
E3 kicks things off with announcements that affect the entire industry, RTX celebrates everything about one of the biggest gaming communities out there, and Games Done Quick is a week-long speedrunning marathon for a great cause.
Then, there's EVO.
It's hard to find a genre of video game as inherently competitive as one-on-one fighters. First-person shooters may have birthed the Deathmatch, but they started off as single-player experiences — fighting games, on the other hand, have always been about proving that one player is better than the other.
With the global video game community growing exponentially, it was only a matter of time before players got together to find out who is the best in the world. Of course, the tournament has changed quite a bit since the inaugural event kicked off in 2002 — for anyone who hasn't been following the fighting game scene, it can be a little hard to follow.
With the EVO 2016 Championship kicking off later today, now is the perfect time to explain the ins and outs of the world's biggest fighting game tournament.
The Games
While many tournaments will feature a set prize from the outset, EVO has always handled things a bit differently.
Each individual game features its own prize pool, and the cash prize is determined by the number of participants. Basically, the bigger the game, the bigger the prize — and considering that even the smallest of EVO tournaments will be made up of dozens of different players, the prize pools are guaranteed to be big.
For tournaments like Street Fighter V and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the prize pools are absolutely huge. Hundreds upon hundreds of players all contribute to the same prize pools, and at the end of the day, the payout is ridiculous. Case in point: at EVO 2015, the grand prize for Ultra Street Fighter IV was more than $72,000.
Needless to say, these players aren't fighting for chump change.
The only thing left to do is watch. You can catch all of the action straight from the EVO 2016 home page, or from the official Twitch channel!
EVO 2016 will begin in full on July 15, with the Grand Finals airing all throughout the day on Sunday, July 17.
