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Team Pandamonium and Tainted Minds will go head-to-head in the Smite Split One final at the CyberGamer Premier League this weekend at Australian Technology Park.
Both teams will fight it out for the lion’s share of the $10,000 prize pool on offer this weekend, and will set the tone for the second and third split finals later in the year, which determine qualification for the Smite World Championships in 2017.
Pandamonium dominated the Oceania region in 2015 and made their way to this year’s World Championships. With just the single roster change since, they are the favourites to beat Tainted Minds, a squad formed earlier this year that managed to stun last year’s second-best team, the Dire Wolves.
For the first time the event will host four different titles, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Rocket League rounding out the events.
Avid eSports fans will notice the absence of traditional titles DOTA 2, League of Legends and StarCraft II. In their place is Smite, a multiplayer online battle arena game threatening to shake up the world of eSports.
The first Smite World Championship was held in January of 2015, and boasted a prize pool of $2.6 million USD. That prize pool was the third-highest in eSports history, behind only the third and fourth editions of DOTA 2’s The International.
Since then, Hi-Rez Studios, the developers of Smite, announced the prize money for the World Championships would be capped at $1 million USD, in a moved designed to grow the sport and spread money more evenly across its player base.
“In order to grow our sport over the long haul, we think it is important that we allow as many people as possible to make a living pursuing Smite eSports,” Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam wrote on Reddit.
“This means having as many players as we can be able to make a decent and predictable wage by playing Smite.”
Smite provides a considerable amount of money, by local standards, to the Oceania region; $65,000 was offered in prize money at last year’s Oceanic Championships, and $100,000 is up for grab over the course of the three splits this year.
This weekend’s event gets underway at 2:30pm on Sunday, April 17, with spectators allowed to attend at no cost. It will also be streamed live online on Twitch TV.