FXOpen e-Sports promises biggest M'sian StarCraft II tournament series yet [updated]

FXOpen e-Sports will be organising a StarCraft II tournament series in Malaysia with a prize format that “will be the biggest Malaysia has seen in any e-Sport event”, according to FXOpen e-Sports’s manager Joshua “FXOBoSs” Dentrinos.

In a Twitter response to queries from No Game No Talk, FXOpen e-Sports further clarified that the tournament series would be open only to residents of Malaysia and there are plans for at least three seasons.

According to details posted on FXOBoSs’s Tumblr blog, each tournament season will see two days of qualifiers, with 32 players eventually qualifying for the group stage. It appears that the top 16 players will then proceed to a single-elimination playoff. All qualifying players will receive a portion of the total prize pool.

“Whilst the quality of players in Malaysia is not at GSL level, we need to give them something to fight for in order to get to that level,” FXOBoSs stated in the blog post.

A sustained tournament series is rare in the Southeast Asian region and, in my opinion, is the right step towards the growth of esports in a region where tournaments are typically treated as one-off events by both organisers and players.

Besides that, I’m personally excited about the prospects — likely slim — that the venue of the matches played could be in a mamak store, a kind of food establishment serving Indian street cuisine, typically 24 hours a day. That would be really cool and would showcase a unique aspect of Malaysia to the world.

More details about the planned tournament series can be found in FXOBoSs’s Tumblr post.

Update 1: We previously reported that the total prize pool at last year’s SMM Grand National Dota Tournament was RM61,500 (US$19,600). That is incorrect and should have been RM116,500 (~US$37,000). The article has been updated accordingly.

Update 2: We previously compared the prize pool to the SMM Grand National Dota Tournament on the basis of FXOBoSs’s remarks that the prize “will be the biggest Malaysia has seen in any e-Sport event”. FXOpen e-Sports has since clarified that as the StarCraft II tournament will be domestic-only, the prize pool would definitely not be as big as an event with international teams.