It’s been three weeks since the coronavirus pandemic forced everyone to split up and confine themselves to their homes, and Facebook Gaming just gave users early access to Tournaments, a feature that will help gamers play together remotely to alleviate symptoms of cabin fever.
The social media giant launched Tournaments to allows gamers to stay remotely connected with each other by creating, joining or following virtual gaming competitions.
According to Facebook, Tournaments offers registration, seeding, bracket management and score entry — all the tools that creators and competition organizers can use at their disposal. They can create and host any type of tournament they see fit, be it single elimination, double elimination or round robin tournaments. Whether it’s a competition among friends or a global eSports competition, the tournaments are open to everyone who wants to participate.
Just like on Twitch, creators can host tournaments while streaming games like Injustice 2, Destiny 2 and Fortnite (Ninja’s favorite), and they can utilize charity tools that allow them to fundraise for causes that they care about the most.
Tournaments is still an unfinished product, but with Facebook Gaming rising within the ranks of Twitch and Mixer in the game streaming market, Facebook released the early access version of the feature to help gamers play together while practicing social distancing until the coronavirus pandemic passes as part of the #PlayApartTogether campaign.
Facebook has a tendency to steal ideas from other social media sites and implement them on their site and other platforms they own — such as the Story feature from Snapchat, which they integrated into Instagram and later their home site — but Tournaments is the first feature they created within Facebook Gaming. Twitch and other game streaming don’t have a similar feature like it, but if Tournaments takes off at the same rate as its home site did in the 2000s, they might follow suit.
