Evo 2024 is the biggest video game tournament ever, as it passes 10,000 unique competitors
They'll be playing Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and a host of other games at a scale many thought impossible.
Competitor regristration for Evo - the world's biggest fighting game tournament - has concluded. With its closure, the tournament's organisers have revealed that it's surpassed 10,000 unique competitors, making it the largest video game tournament in history. This figure also does not include non-competitor ticket sales, which will remain available until the tournament's start in July.
This news was posted on social media and was paired alongside a blog post on the official Evo website. The post elaborates that the tournament has also broken several game-specific records, including Tekken 8, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. Exact figures will be released in the near future.
To help accomodate this, the tournament will be held in a larger venue that last year, the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Centre. Over 10,000 entrants is a wild milestone, especially when you consider that it means that roughly 5,000 people will enter a bracket and lose 0-2 in pools - then being left to wander the casinos distraught, broke, and free. Nonetheless these are 10,000 people paying a significant amount of money to support an esports tournament, while other scenes struggle to tempt fans into throwing a few dollars towards a team's jersey .
This figure is, obviously, huge! A benefit of the open-bracket format and years of gradual somewhat sustainable growth built on ticket sales, advertising, and showfloor stalls. This 10,000 figure also means that Evo will need more volunteers than ever, so if you're in town for the event and don't mind lending a hand with keeping the machine turning, then you can apply on the official Evo website.
We'll be on the shoor floor this July, bringing previews, interviews, and hot new reveals as they happen, so keep popping back here between July 19 and 21 for all of that.