The gaming market has experienced a sudden surge of activity and sales thanks to people being cooped up at home.That is why Facebook has rolled out tournaments, a feature of its gaming platform that allows users to put together a gaming competition. It’s intended for regular users who might want to have some competition while social distancing.Esports isn’t the only way gamers can pit their skills against one another thus Facebook is introducing early access tournaments that will encourage ‘friendly competition’.
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1/ Social distancing means we have to be apart, but games can still bring us together. So today we’re opening early access to Facebook Gaming tournaments, a feature to help people stay connected through games. pic.twitter.com/rYOIXBcIHS
— Facebook Gaming #playaparttogether (@FacebookGaming) April 7, 2020
With the tournaments’, gamers can organise a proper gaming event which includes registration for singles or teams, seeding, and score entry. The feature allows you to create multiple tournament styles such as single elimination, double elimination, and round-robin.
Facebook’s Tournament feature is intended to help the company setup an e-sports platform. The company said that the early roll-out of the feature is aimed at helping gamers and casual gaming enthusiasts to connect during the Covid-19 lockdown in many countries, and also encourage social distancing.
Tournaments were apparently intended to help Facebook set up an esports platform, but the current world situation prompted the company to roll it out early. The conceit is that regular gamers could use the feature to put together their own social distancing gaming tournaments. Mina Abouseif, the engineer behind tournaments, told VentureBeat:
“Our mission for Facebook gaming is to build the world’s gaming community and organized gameplay has always been a big part of gaming, regardless of levels of competition… Whether it’s someone getting together with family and friends or whether it’s a creator of a tournament for viewers or supporters, or whether it’s an esports organization, this is a big part of gaming.”
Tournaments is also part of Facebook’s efforts as part of the World Health Organisation’s Play Apart Together campaign, the point of which is to encourage people to get their social interaction via gaming. So the idea is that, if a group of people want to have a little competition — say for example, a group of streamers — then this will make it easier.
Facebook’s been trying to make its gaming platform into a streaming/esports haven for a while now, even going so far as to join the fight over popular streamers. So far, it’s signed a number of popular streamers to the platform, and Tournaments would be the next big boost to its profile.