This year's London weekend of the Call of Duty League took place before the pandemic.

The DeanBeat: The Call of Duty League delivers a throne and a $4.6 million prize pool this weekend

This weekend, the Call of Duty League Championship will take place as a virtual esports tournament, and the winner will take the throne. In this case, it’s an actual throne, designed for the winning team to take home and sit in. The event will cap a grueling season for virtual esports and a big week for the Call of Duty franchise, which announced its new Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War this week.

Four teams will compete for the throne: the Atlanta FaZe, Dallas Empire, Chicago Huntsmen, and London Royal Ravens. The winner will take home $1.5 million, and the total purse is around $4.6 million. For the first time, the league has been organized along a city-based franchise model, like the Overwatch League that preceded it and professional sports franchises. Disrupted by the pandemic, this year’s physical events were canceled and everything moved online in April. I am frankly surprised that, given all of the events that have happened this year, this league is pushing toward a finish line with viewership that shows significant growth. Somehow, in a year full of Warzone and George Floyd and #MeToo, spectators found enough reason to watch a bunch of nerds play video games.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.