Guilty Gear Esports Wants To Keep Scaling, Intelligently
The Arc World Tour, the developer-owned official tournament for Guilty Gear Strive, is wrapping their arms around South America according to ArcSys senior esports manager Junior Ferriera. The $100k grand prize tournament is headed to the southern hemisphere this year, making legacy event Battle Colosseum its first stop in Brazil. But that expansion was not without trepidation, as they made tough choices not to include countries like Mexico and Canada.
Ferriera, who hails from Brazil, says that it’s been good but also challenging to see how the Guilty Gear community has grown, echoing some of the sentiments from game producer, Ken Miyauchi. But when it comes to esports, Ferriera says that it's going to be important for ArcSys to expand its footprint but to be mindful of its current capabilities.
“I honestly don’t know how Street Fighter is going to sustain that [$2 million dollar] prize.” he says. “But we have a $100,000 prize pool which is still a huge amount of money for the games that are in the space[…]”
And he’d be correct. Even for EVO, the largest fighting game tournament in the world, prize pools rarely broke above the $60k mark. So having any pool in the six- to seven-figure range is already a financial outlier in the FGC. Unlike many other esports, fighting games’ funding structures around microtransactions and DLC haven’t necessarily been as wholly embraced as other genres of games like MOBAs.
The tournament formerly known as Arc Revo, the World Tour has been the end cap for Guilty Gear for a number of years, and their foray into South America is also trying to tap into the general public consciousness as well. Ferriera revealed ArcSys inked a TV deal that will see the Guilty Gear bracket televised in Brazil, one of the first deals of its kind for fighting games in Brazil. One might remember that EVO 2016 was televised on ESPN2 in the US, complete with an overview from NBA Hall of Famer, Bill Walton. By uplifting the scene in Brazil and elsewhere, ArcSys is bringing unforgettable moments to those regions.
“Finding more Guilty Gear Strive players in these other regions of the world has been such a humbling experience,” says Ferriera. “And the most fun for me is trying to make our players feel like superstars, and I want that experience to change their lives.”
The Arc World Tour is currently underway and Battle Colosseum stop takes place November 24-26 of this year.
