Evo Championship Series 2012 - The World's Best - Fighting Games vs. eSports?!

It's time for the big one folks! Following last year's EVO 2011 and the Road to EVO 2012 season we are now just one week away from EVO 2012, the world fighting game championships. 2012 has certainly been packed with events this year leading up to EVO and now the best players from around the world will meet in Las Vegas.

EVO 2011 Recap

http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2011/jul/29/evo-2011-live-stream-team-sp00ky-x-iplaywinner/

Featured Games

Records are being broken for EVO 2012, we've got over 3,500 entrants playing mixtures of the titles this year, with $100,000 in prizes up for grabs.

Capcom - The Rise of SSFIV and UMvC3 and the Fall of Street Fighter X Tekken

Thanks to the release of SSFIV: Arcade Edition Version. 2012 and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the two games will be a lot more balanced affair this time around. No longer will the top 8 be dominated by Yun, Fei Long and C.Viper and no longer will Level 3 X-Factor Dark Phoenix be the overbearing character she was. Players are in a much better mindset for both games and going into EVO 2012, the winner of both AE 2012 and UMvC3 could be one of any 20 to 40 players.

And then we have the proverbial red-headed step child of fighting games, Street Fighter X Tekken, making its 2 vs 2 debut (448 teams) at EVO 2012.

• Gems are practically unusable because of the amount of time needed to set them up each match would double or even triple the time taken to complete the tournament
• The DLC on the disc/playable online hacked characters nonsense had left a bad taste in everyone's mouths
• Labelled by tournament players as Jab X Timeout, the game simply isn't fun to play or watch at a competitive level

Fighting Games and eSports

There's been a lot of debate about fighting games joining the eSports movement and while Capcom have stated their position is firmly against their games featuring at MLG (following an attempt in the past during the days when an event only had one stream, the fighting games viewers and the Starcraft viewers collided in the stream chat), MLG in turn turned their attention to other games outside of Capcom, those being Mortal Kombat, Soulcalibur V and The King of Fighters XIII.

Following two events at MLG in which MK and ScV had over 70 entrants at both, KOFXIII failed to break 40 entrants on both occasions. With the general assumption that KOFXIII will be dropped, many in the eSports camp dismissed KOF for its community not supporting their game. Yet look at the amount of entrants at EVO for the game, eclipsing both MK and ScV combined. Why? A very good article on iPlayWinner argues that for all MLG's prize money and high production value, the one thing they miss is the most important thing that Community events like CEO 2012 and UFGT8 do. They make you think, "You want to be a part of this," through engagement and the sense of community. http://iplaywinner.com/news/2012/6/18/the-salty-runback-community-effort.html

Also Featuring

The 25th anniversary Super Street Fighter II Turbo Tournament of Legends 32 man invitational plus Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown ($15000 prize pool from Sega) and Skullgirls ($1000 prize pool from Autumn Games) side tournaments.

Thursday (July 5th 10PM PDT) Pre-show!

Fighting game player and Evil Genius's own Floe (master of the Floe Face) has had a very popular stream channel http://www.twitch.tv/eg_floe trying to become "The Guy" in the crazy platformer indie game, I Wanna Be The Guy. This Thursday on stream 1, Floe will rage for everyone's entertainment playing I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden in the official Evo pre-show.

Indie Game Showcase

In an effort to provide some interesting indie titles to an audience receptive of them, EVO this year will feature 7 indie titles, one of which you may of heard of if you've seen my previous event blogs for UFGT8 and CEO 2012.

The 7 titles will be Aztez, BaraBariBall, DIVEKICK, Nidhogg, SpyParty, Super Comboman and Super Time Force (three of which need pages creating on Giant Bomb, get on that!).

“While on the surface EVO is a fighting game tournament for hardcore fans, dig a little deeper and you’ll learn that it’s much more than that. EVO has always pushed traditional gaming outside of the expected, and far past the norm. As an event, it represents how vast & varied gaming can be, and how much crazy fun can be had when it’s all mashed together into a weekend of tournaments & BYOC. A lot of these tenets & goals line up one-to-one with the core of independent game development. With this in mind, I’m extremely excited that EVO has partnered with the other indie game developers to showcase their games in the Indie Gaming Showcase.

Plus… we all can’t wait for the FGC to absolutely tear our games apart!”

Nathan Vella
Co-founder & president, CAPY (Super Time Force)

Stream Details

For the first time, EVO will be streamed on Twitch.tv, Spooky and Haunts from Team Spooky and iPlayWinner will be handling the stream duties once again, following their successful showing last year.

Stream 1 (Pools, Quarter-finals, Semi-finals, Finals) - http://www.twitch.tv/srkevo1

Stream 2 (Pools, Quarter-finals, Semi-finals) - http://www.twitch.tv/srkevo2

Stream 3 (Panels) - http://www.twitch.tv/srkevo3

The guys at shoryuken.com have set up a handy Custom Player (complete with the weekend's full schedule) page for viewing all three streams and chat however you want at http://evo2012.s3.amazonaws.com/live/index.html

$12 720p HD stream = Annual Evo $10,000 College Scholarship for Gamers

http://evo.shoryuken.com/2012/06/26/shoryuken-com-introduces-the-evo-annual-10000-college-scholarship-for-gamers/

Get your Evo 2012 Ticket! This is a one time purchase for the Evo 2012 streams, July 6 - 8, 2012.

Proceeds will go towards the foundation of an annual $10,000 Evo college scholarship for gamers pursuing degrees in gaming and technology. Evo 2012 ticket holders will receive:

EVO 2012 ticket holders will receive:

»No ads

»720p quality streams

»Access to chat

»Custom Emoticons

»The warm fuzzy feeling of helping your fellow gamers fulfill their dreams

All for the price of $12.00.

In Closing

With UFGT8 and CEO 2012, I could've easily said, "if you watch one fighting game stream this year..." but to be honest, as good as they were (and as much potential they have to be on the same level), they don't currently compare to EVO. EVO is the tournament that all players go to above any others and there's a reason why EVO 2011 broke the 85,000 concurrent (2.2 million unique views) stream viewers (on the ustream stream channel alone) mark.

I hope you can tune in and make this even bigger than last year.

Official EVO 2012 / 2k12 Livestream Discussion Thread (July 6-8)