High school and college sports are about to evolve as Fortnite comes an official sport with the help of a Los Angeles based start-up company, PlayVs.
PlayVs and Epic Games have partnered up in order to bring a competitive league play to high school and college students. This competition marks PlayVs’s entry into colleges and universities, according to TechCrunch.
PlayVs was originally launched in April, 2018 and its main goal was bringing esports to high schools, a league of electronic sports bearing a similar importance to basketball and football. PlayVs partnered up with the National Federation of State High school Associations which allowed high schools – or parents or the students themselves – the ability to pay $64 per player to be placed in a league against neighbouring schools.
However, PlayVs’s partnerships go further than the NFHS, because the company is partnering up with the game publishers themselves. According to the founder of PlayVs Delane Parnell, this is the part that puts PlayVs a step ahead of its competition.
PlayVs is the first company to achieve a partnership with Epic Games. However, other companies are setting up competitive leagues around video games, very few of them – if any – are in partnerships with the game publishers. Which means that the start-ups could be shut down at any time by the publishers who own the IP address of the game.
PlayVs’s partnership allows it to put the experience on the market in a way that requires almost no lift for schools. All the players have to do is sign into PlayVs and they will be added to their scheduled match. At the end of the match, PlayVs collects the stats and insights from the match which is available to the players, fans, recruiters and coaches.
On the other hand, the collegiate level is a challenge for PlayVs. Due to the fact that the NFHS has grown quickly with the high school expansion. Since PlayVs launched there have been more than 13,000 high schools on the waitlist to get a varsity esports team through PlayVs which represents 68% of America.
The NFHS has an existing relationship with the NCAA, unfortunately there is no official partnership between them so PlayVS has to go to each college directly to pitch their technology. On the bright side, PlayVs is pitching their technology at a time when many colleges are looking to add esports to their scholarships and programmes.
Back to the Fortnite competition, the first season will be free to registered users as courtesy of the partnership with Epic Games as this is a different title compared to the rest of PlayVs’s titles. The First Season’s registration closes on February 17 for high schools and February 24 for colleges and universities. The first season officially starts on March 2nd, the format of the competition will be Duos. Each organization can submit as many teams of two as they would like, and the top teams will be sent to the playoffs with an opportunity to win a spot in the May championship.
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