A new challenger is coming to the esports table.
CD Projekt Red announced the Gwent Challenger tournament today. The competition will pit four players against professional gamers in the digital card game, which is in beta for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. They will compete for a prize pool of $100,000. You can sign up for the tournament here, which is for the PC version of the game.
This is Gwent’s first big overture toward the esports world, a market that will generate as much as $696 million in revenues this year, according to intelligence firm Newzoo. The digital card game Hearthstone has become a big hit, thanks in part to its popularity as a competitive game. Hearthstone alone earned $394.6 million earned in revenue in 2016, according tor research firm SuperData. SuperData also expects the whole digital card game market to earn $1.4 billion in 2017.
The four pros in the tournament come from the Hearthstone world:
- Trump (Jeffrey Shih)
- Lifecoach (Adrian Koy)
- Noxious (Kacem Khilaji)
- Ppd (Peter Dager)
Gwent started life as a minigame inside The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, an open-world role-playing game that CD Projekt Red in 2015. Now, the digital card game is becoming a standalone, free-to-play title.