Smartphone brand iQOO, which had launched the first 5G smartphone in India about two years ago, has announced its first e-sports tournament for Battlegrounds Mobile India, called the iQOO All Stars Cup. The event will begin on August 26th at 6pm IST and will continue till August 31. It will be streamed on the iQOO Esports channel on YouTube. Battlegrounds Mobile India, of course, is the revamped version of PUBG Mobile launched exclusively for the Indian market. The game had been launched earlier this year, after the Indian government banned PUBG Mobile in India last year.
iQOO’s six-day tournament will include 16 BGMI teams in India, with a prize money of Rs. 5,00,000 for the winning teams. The prize money will be distributed amongst the top three podium finished and there’s an award for the “Fully Loaded Performer”, which will be given to the Most Valuable Player (MVP) in the tournament. “The iQOO All Stars Cup is a unique initiative that will help elevate eSports in the country. It will act as a platform for potential professional gamers to showcase their best game-streaming talent. We see huge potential in the growing esports space and are committed to empower the next-generation gamers in the country,” said Gagan Arora, Director, Marketing at iQOO.
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You can watch the first round in the video embedded below. The company has also partnered with comedians Tanmay Bhatt and Samay Raina, and YouTube and influencer GameFleet for the event.
Of course, this isn’t the only e-sports event that’s built around BGMI in India. The game’s creator, Krafton, had announced the BGMI India Series on August 18, which begins next month. Registrations for that tournament are on now.
In fact, PUBG Mobile is pretty much the game that brought e-sports to India’s mobile gaming community, so BGMI is expected to have a lot of tournaments running around it. The game will also have competition from Garena’s FreeFire and Call of Duty: Mobile this time. Both of the games gained popularity in India in the time that it took Krafton to launch BGMI after the ban. BGMI also hit 50 million downloads in India recently, so the game is getting traction in India quite fast.
