Get ready for competitive online gaming tournaments with ridiculously large numbers of players. Sony Online Entertainment and Major League Gaming are partnering to turn the online shooter PlanetSide 2 into an e-sport tournament game with huge numbers of players.

PlanetSide 2 is only two months old, but the free-to-play online game has taken off with more than 3 million registered players to date. It is a big endorsement for MLG to include the young game in its roster of e-sports tournament games, which draw six million spectators a month. That blessing will likely help PlanetSide 2 grow its engagement and user count.

John Smedley, president of SOE, said in an interview with GamesBeat that MLG will help create a special section within the world of PlanetSide 2 where spectator viewable e-sports matches will take place. PlanetSide 2 is a game where as many as 2,000 players can gather in a single continent, or arena, and battle each other for control of a planet’s resources. Smedley said it is conceivable that hundreds of players from a single empire could join in on qualifying matches in the early stages of a tournament. Then the number of players could be reduced to make the tournament more manageable.

“We’re growing at a very fast rate and we’re so impressed with MLG,” Smedley said. “We can get 600 or 700 people on one team, bring a massive scale that no other game can deliver. The competitive sport will add a new level to the meta game.”

No particular match sizes have been created yet. But a clan could nominate its top 50 players to participate in the playoff rounds, with a smaller number of players fighting it out in the MLG finals, Smedley said. Sundance DiGiovanni, chief executive of MLG in New York, said that the largest matches today are just five players against another five, though the league has done some eight versus eight matches in the past.

With huge matches, DiGiovanni thinks that PlanetSide 2 could scale up interest in the eSports, which are steadily gaining momentum. PlanetSide 2 has three factions known as Empires: Terran Republic, New Conglomerate, and Vanu Sovereignty — all fighting in air and ground combat for control of the alien planet Auraxis.

“PlanetSide 2 really has an interesting and complex approach to the shooter environment, and it brings out new levels of strategy and team play,” DiGiovanni said. “This will lead us to do some things we have never tried before.”

Sony and MLG will collaborate in the next few months to create ideal competitive game play features and settings to showcase the massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game. MLG will broadcast the tournament and create additional original programming around it on its MLG network and on Twitch, the game livestream site. Twitch is already built into PlanetSide 2, where players can broadcast their matches as they play them.

PlanetSide 2 gaming stations will be featured at MLG’s first Pro Circuit event of 2013 – the Winter Championship in Dallas, Texas, from March 15-17. Smedley said that the design team began plotting how to turn the MMO into an eSport, using a separate continent, after talks began with MLG. But there isn’t a working prototype yet.

MLG has more than eight million registered gamers and gets about 6.5 million viewers a month from 170 countries. During a single event weekend, as many as 5 million people will tune in to watch. Smedley said the game is monetizing great as players purchase upgrades and decorative virtual goods.

“We are monetizing great already and that is not our primary purpose for doing this,” Smedley said. “MLG can showcase AAA content, and there is no better partner for that.”

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Twitch is all about capturing the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in the world of professional gaming. The company provides “eSports” videos and other content to more than 20 million unique viewers a month. And now it will be on the expansion path thanks to a $15 million investment led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

A backwater for many years, the eSports category of broadcasting tournament matches between professional gamers has taken off, and Twitch is positioning itself at the forefront of the live video-game streaming community. Twitch’s Matthew DiPietro, vice president of marketing, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the money will make it possible to expand the company’s engineering team and improve its live video game streaming services across the globe.For the semi-serious gamer who isn’t a professional player, it’s also getting a lot easier to broadcast live game matches, DiPietro said. Earlier this summer, Twitch launched its software development kit inside Showdown Effect, a game from Paradox Interactive, which put the SDK into the game client so that a gamer can stream his or her game play directly from inside the game to a Twitch TV account on the Internet.

“People are clamoring to share their game playing with the rest of the world,” DiPietro said. “We are removing those barriers. It’s a one-click process to broadcast your match. It’s easy to consume, anywhere you want to consume it.”

Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates also participated in this round of investing.

“We launched Twitch a little over a year ago, and already we have more than 20 million unique viewers per month,” said Emmett Shear, chief executive of Twitch. We have also partnered with more than 2,000 incredible broadcasters and have integrated our product with leading game publishers. I’m very proud of our accomplishments, but there’s so much more to do. Our current team has put us at the forefront of the live video game streaming movement, and we can now invest aggressively to support our growing community with new ways to stream, watch, and chat.”

Twitch has raised a total of about $23 million to date, including a small seed round in 2005 and a first round of $8 million in 2007, when the company was operating as JustinTV. In June 2011, JustinTV launched TwitchTV, which grew to 12 million viewers a month by January 2012 and is now almost double that. Twitch plans to expand its global infrastructure and partner with more companies as it expands its service.

“Twitch is exactly the kind of company that we seek for investment,” said Ethan Kurzweil, vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Twitch is not just a game changer: They created the game and are creating new experiences for their community. We’re looking forward to them accelerating their lead and continuing to change the rules as they go.”

Kurzweil said that the eSports opportunity is a massive one as more and more viewers take to the web to watch videos. He also said he admired how the company successfully pivoted to different business models over time.

“That’s the kind of entrepreneurs we like to work with,” Kurzweil said. “They created this market. They created a whole phenomenon.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Hayward (pictured), a forward for the Utah Jazz pro basketball team, will try his hand at the eSport of professional video games in a league sponsored by News Corp.’s IGN Entertainment. The move will bring more credibility and new attention to the fledgling spectator sport of pro gaming, which has struggled for years to be recognized as a real sport.

Hayward’s signing should put to rest the notion that video games are for non-athletic kids. Hayward will play in his first professional match in the StarCraft II gaming tournament in Atlantic City during Oct. 6-9. Like a number of pro athletes, Hayward is passionate about StarCraft II, a real-time strategy sci-fi game published by Blizzard Entertainment.

“I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember.  I’m a competitive guy, and I love the competitive nature of video games,” Hayward said in a statement. “Pro-gamers are really sports stars themselves. The mental strategy that goes into planning your next move and what your opponent is going to do are skills you need to be successful playing basketball — and playing StarCraft II.”

Other pro athletes that have a passion for gaming include Kevin Garnett, a forward for the Boston Celtics, who recently played American troops during Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty Black Ops event.

Hayward will train with IGN coaches and challenge global StarCraft II stars who go by nicknames such as IdrA, Select and WhiteRa. The prize pool will be $100,000 at the Caesars Atlantic City event, which will host 256 qualifying players.

David Ting, general manager of eSports and head of research at IGN Entertainment, said that games are becoming a dominant entertainment medium and the event aims to show how pro gaming can become as popular as mainstream athletic sports. IGN launched its IGN Pro League in April and has 1.2 million unique visitors and 6 million page views so far for its online tournaments.

[photo credit: the big lead]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The live streaming site launched a new landing page for job-seekers, saying it wants to “be the world’s best live esports site.” Justin.tv is already widely used as a place to broadcast live streams of video game matches in games like World of Warcraft and Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Gamers also use other live-streaming sites like UStream to broadcast their game matches.

Electronic sports leagues, or e-sports, are already really popular internationally — particularly in countries like South Korea, where players compete for tens of thousands of dollars in prize money in massive tournaments. But the league has only grown slowly in the United States because it hasn’t achieved the same level of visibility that professional gaming has internationally. But a number of companies are doing their part to bring more attention to professional gaming.

Activision-Blizzard, the developer of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, cut a large chunk of content from that game and made it less graphically demanding to ensure that it would be a better vehicle for professional gamers. The company regularly holds massive tournaments at its annual conference in Anaheim, Calif. There is also a professional gaming league site called Major League Gaming that features clips from professional gaming matches and a forum where gamers can meet and schedule matches.

Justin.tv gives individuals a way to stream content live to the internet, whether it is from their webcams, mobile phones or wired in from a TV. The company also has iPhone and applications for phones running Google’s mobile operating system Android. Both apps let users live broadcast video streams from their phones. The company just launched a new app focused more on video-sharing than livestreaming called Socialcam.

Live streaming has become pretty popular — live stream usage jumped 650 percent in 2010 when compared to 2009. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company was part of the Y Combinator incubator program and has also received funding from Alsop Louie partners and Tim Draper — though the exact amount of money they have raised is unclear.

[Photo: VideogameVisionary.com]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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