Last year, Epic Games unveiled that the company was going to use a tremendous $100 million esports prize pool for competitions in this season. At the moment of the announcement, that was nothing more than a piece of information. However, after the news of $30 million spent for Fortnite World Cup, we now can look further into the money so far and see how the fund has been distributed and how the creator will spend the whole $100 million this year.
The biggest event to date has been the Fall Skirmish
The happening series of esports game events started with the Summer Skirmish campaign, which to some people are quite awkward. It lasted for eight weeks from Jul to Sep 2018. The Summer Skirmish tournament was believed to have an $8 million total prize pool, as of Esports Earnings records. Prize pools for each week rose quickly to $1 million for every week across European and US competitions. At the last week, prized increased to over $1.6 millions for the competition.
Following was the Fall Skirmish event that finished with over $10 million total prize pool. The difference from the previous event was a $4 million added prize pool given directed to winning “Club”. A point system is used to decide the winning club.
Apart from the two listed Skirmish tournaments, the rest of the events up to now have much a smaller prize pool.
A Fortnite’s tournament
Epic Games spent $1 million for the Winter Royale and $500,000 for the Secret Skirmish. The Australian Open Summer Smash received a prize pool of $285,000. Finally, the ESL Katowice Royale in March 1-3 will have a prize pool of $500,000.
Until now, Epic Games has used more than $20 million for six tournaments with eight months of competitions. With its current spending on tournament prize, Fortnite holds the fifth position in all-time esports standings in Esports Earnings data records. Thanks to the World Cup event, Fortnite will take the fourth position from StarCraft II. And after distributing the whole $100 million fund, it will earn itself the second place and only stay behind Dota2.
For the World Cup, Fortnite spends $30 million prize pool for the main game only. A total of further $10 million, which is $1 million for every week, will also be distributed during the competitions.
Epic Games also talked about weekly $1 million events until the end of 2019 in the World Cup announcement. Though no specific information has been released on the time of these events, let’s estimate they would happen when the World Cup ends on July 26. If so, there will be 20 weeks which is equal to a total of $20 million of the prize pool.
This leaves us with the last $20 million unrevealed prize pool for Epic Games to distribute to reach the number of $100 million as promised.
It seems that there will still be more interesting events held by Epic Games for the second half of the year.