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Tech

'Call of Duty' Is Dropping $3M to Gain a Foothold in eSports

The best way to insure the lasting power of a game is supporting an eSports community around it.
Image: Activision

With 175 million copies sold to date, Call of Duty is one of the biggest first-person shooter series ever, but it never caught as a major eSport.

On Thursday, publisher Activision announced it aims to change that with Call of Duty World League, an eSports league where pros and amateurs alike will compete in Call of Duty: Black Ops III for a prize pool of $3 million, the biggest in the game's history.

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The Call of Duty World League includes a Pro Division and Challenge Division. Each will feed into the grand finale, the Call of Duty Championship, which Activision is building up as "the biggest event in console eSports."

Call of Duty is a huge game, but it's not huge in eSports, a rapidly growing segment of the gaming industry. Common wisdom these days is that the best way to insure the lasting power of a game after release and to keep selling players additional content for that game is supporting an eSports community around it.

In this respect, big as it is, Call of Duty has a lot of catching up to do with Counter-Strike, an overall smaller game, but the most popular first-person shooter in eSports. For example, we just learned today that Counter-Strike eSports matches will air on TBS.

Halo is in a similar situation. It's a hugely popular first-person shooter, but not so much in eSports, so Microsoft has recently been promoting the Halo Championship Series, which had a $150,000 prize pool, and Halo 5: Guardians Arena mode, which developer 343 says is tailored for the eSports crowd.

Microsoft and Activision already have some of the biggest multiplayer first-person shooter games to work with, they just need to quickly build a strong, professional, competitive community around them. An easy way to do that is with a large prize pool, and $3 million is an impressive figure, considering that the prize pools for the biggest Counter-Strike events are $250,000.