PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, still in Steam's Early Access program, will hold its first major eSports tournament next month at Gamescom, the biggest video game event in Europe.
The game is still unfinished, with the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds final release date pushed back to the end of the year. The development team of the massively popular multiplayer shooter, however, has been working hard to keep millions of players engaged and interested in the Battle Royale-inspired game.
Gamescom 'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' Invitational
Through a Steam update, PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, announced that the first offline invitational tournament for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds will be held at Gamescom this year, which will run from Aug. 23 to Aug. 26.
PlayerUnknown and the Bluehole Games development team will hold daily qualifiers at Gamescom to give attendees a chance to compete at the first Gamescom PUBG Invitational. The eSports tournament, however, will be very unlike the standard solo and team matches held for other games.
The Gamescom PUBG Invitational will feature 80 players engaging each other in the game's Battle Royale-inspired free-for-all matches in a three-game set. There will be competitions in all modes, namely solo, duo, first-person duo, and squad.
The tournament will have a prize pool of $350,000, with Bluehole Games to sell cosmetic items to fund the prize pool and to accumulate funds for charity donations. These cosmetic items will be sold as in-game crates that can be purchased for $2.50 each.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Next Update To Add 'Battle Royale' Skins
Since selling 2 million copies just five weeks after being added to Steam's Early Access program, the popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has skyrocketed further, with over 6 million copies sold in four months.
Bluehole Games has been hard at work in releasing updates to the game, and on Aug. 3, the highly requested first-person only mode will arrive for hardcore players looking for a tougher challenge. On the same date, three new crates will be added to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. The first two crates, the Wanderer Crate and the Survivor Crate, will be free to open and will include one set of themed clothing. The third crate, the Gamescom Invitational Crate, is the aforementioned crate that will be sold for $2.50 each.
The Gamescom Invitational Crate will contain clothing inspired by Battle Royale, the Japanese film that itself inspired PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. The clothing are purely cosmetic items and will not grant any in-game bonuses, but they do make your characters look cool as you try to survive against a horde of opponents.
