About a month after launching its new Arena platform in Preview, Microsoft is expanding its offering by allowing players to create their own competitive tournaments via Xbox Live.
Prior to the announcement, game developers, eSports organizations and Microsoft were the only ones who could organize Arena tournaments, but with the recent news, players will able to create custom tournaments, which will be available in 2017.
“We want to give gamers the ability to create their own tournaments and challenges just like you would do if you were setting up a fantasy football league or joining an intramural soccer team,” Microsoft’s Jenn McCoy said at last week’s announcement.
The news is part of a growing industry trend toward making eSports widely available to anyone in the gaming community, especially on mobile.
Andrew Paradise, Chief Executive Officer of Skillz — a leading mobile eSports company — recently commented about the changing gaming landscape. He said that making mobile accessible to anyone is based on a few key factors, including the global expansion of mobile gaming, the social effects of competition and the arrival of streaming.
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“The exponential growth of smartphone adoption and the launch of the Apple App Store in 2008 radically changed the gaming industry, particularly in the United States, as commercially successful mobile games proliferated across the market,” Paradise said.
“The on-demand nature of streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming have been key drivers of eSports growth. Live streaming helped enable major tournaments to reach the general public and significantly extended their viewership.”
Since its founding in 2012, Skillz has continued to improve the platform to enable eSports in any game, connecting consumers, developers and hosts (streamers/venues) in a fully integrated gaming ecosystem. Earlier this year, Skillz launched the first cross-platform eSports multiplayer platform for mobile games while it also built the first eSports live events system that allows anyone to organize and live stream mobile video game competitions. Over nearly the last five years, its network has grown to include thousands of developers and millions of eSports tournaments.
Paradise said that with the growth of gaming as a whole, there is a heightened level of interest being directed toward mobile right now along with heading into 2017.
“DeNA is building Nintendo games like Animal Crossing, Sony is planning to release at least five new mobile games and Nintendo recently announced the Switch, a new device which allows eSports players to go from console to mobile,” Paradise said. “These developments shows that the largest players in the space take the mobile market very seriously. So I think we’ll see the lines of console, online and mobile eSports continue to blur.”