Amateur esports events will soon overtake professional tournaments by budgets

Gamers have crashed a new gaming quest website: esports events are growing in popularity

Professional esports tournaments will soon begin to lose ground to amateur tournaments on budgets. The latter have more and more participants, and this attracts sponsors.

For example, the prize pool of the second season of Polish Esport Cup Summer 2021 is approximately $3,000; LPL Pro League Season 8 has $7,500. At the same time, EXTREMUM Digital Pass event has collected a prize pool of $20,000 and the number of participants is quite large – 50,000. The project has already been running for two months.

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This is more than a tournament. There was created a large interactive quest for gamers of all categories. Not necessarily for professionals, and age is not so important. 

For successfully completing virtual quests, players earn points that can be spent on real prizes in the DP store. The grand prize is a customizable gaming PC. Now the second season of the project is in full swing. It started on June 1 and will finish on July 25 (the first season was in 2020).

For the first time EXTREMUM brand held a similar quest back in 2019. But it was designed for a small number of users and lasted only 5 days. The event was timed to coincide with the announcement of the Dota 2 lineup, and despite the smaller scale, the project attracted the attention of users. Then the organizers realized that the community was eager for such activities – the gaming audience is mature enough to go beyond the usual formats.

That is why they switched to a wider format. In the first season, it paid off: the audience was 10,000. For such a scale, the developers had to write a huge system from scratch, as there were no similar IT solutions for organizing virtual events. After that, they fixed bugs and eliminated errors, listened to the audience, improved the general approach to the quest, etc.

This season EXTREMUM has not only increased its audience to 50,000 people but also went far beyond the CIS region and now 52% of the audience are English-speaking users. During this season users have already activated more than 1,000,000 game codes in the system. 

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And now it’s not just personal competition. In addition to individual tasks there are clan tasks. Participants join in groups, compete with each other (including in Dota 2 and CS:GO), socialize and make new friends. The number of some clans reaches 150 people.

The organizers didn’t expect the quest to cause such a stir. On average, a drop of 100 prizes is sold out in 5 seconds. During one of the drops the site went down: it couldn’t cope with the huge number of active users. The devs had to urgently expand the technical features of the website. This experience will be taken into account in the future.

Brands began to invest more actively in cyber events. Even at the start of the project, partnership requests kept coming in. Brands began to come to the understanding that the esports audience is now a serious community with broad interests and opportunities.

The final drop of the event will take place on July 25, which means that even new users have the opportunity to earn enough points to claim the grand prize. This point and drop mechanic is designed so that people can join the event at any time. To do this, you need to register on https://pass.extremum.gg/ and start completing tasks in your personal account area.