Tencent Games announced plans for a “Season Zero” of the new PUBG MOBILE World League – the next stage of the game’s 2020 esports ecosystem plan which was revealed at the end of 2019. Forty teams across the world will be divided into two regions, East and West, to compete for a $850K USD prize pool. This is the largest single-event prize pool in PUBG MOBILE history.
As the name implies, Season Zero is considered a unique season adapted to the state of international esports competition in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial 2020 plan had included the broadcasting of World League matches from a newly-developed studio in Katowice, Poland, constructed in partnership with ESL. While that project has moved forward, matches will not take place in the facility until it is safe to do so, according to a release.
Instead, the entirety of the event will take place online. This is an ambitious strategy for Tencent and PUBG MOBILE. The majority of esports have fully canceled their official international competitions due to the difficulty of creating a lag-free environment online across long distances. However, Tencent Games has been running tests and creating infrastructure specifically to achieve this goal, as Director of Global Esports James Yang told The Esports Observer in a recent interview.
According to the 2020 ecosystem plan, in addition to the World League PUBG MOBILE will have a world championship later this year, which will also award a large prize pool – part of the $5M committed by Tencent for the 2020 season.
