Today, Epic Games have announced a great new update to the online competitive play introduced to Fortnite recently: the Winter Royale Online Tournament, with a prize pool of $1,000,000 to be shared among winners over the course of a two-weekend period starting this coming Saturday.

Winter Royale: Two-Weekend Tournament

The Winter Royale tournament is played in solo using the same game settings as the current Pop-Up Cup. The tournament will be split into two phases: Winter Royale Qualifiers and Winter Royale Finals.

• Winter Royale Qualifiers will open to players starting on Saturday, November 24 through Sunday. There will be many sessions during which players will have to aim for the highest score in any given session. Epic states that the top performers in each region for NA and EU will be “verified”, and those players found “eligible” will be invited to participate in the Winter Royale Finals for their region. No more details are provided on this verification process though.
• Winter Royale Finals, which will have a total of $1,000,000 in prizes up for grabs, will open to qualified players starting on November 30 for EU and December 11 for NA.

Who can participate

Anyone from NA and EU regions can participate in the Winter Royale tournament. While this tournament will be restricted to NA and EU, Epic has stated that they are planning on holding “other region-specific tournaments in additional regions in the near future“.

For those interested in competing, the Winter Royale competition dates will as follows:

Winter Royale Qualifiers: 11/24/2018 – 11/25/2018
Europe Winter Royale Finals: 11/30/2018 – 12/1/2018
North America Winter Royale Finals: 12/11/2018 – 12/12/2018

The Winter Royale tournament serves as a live test for Epic’s full grown online eSports offering, which is expected to take shape globally next year.

“The Online Tournament system will be used next year to determine participants in the Fortnite World Cup. Starting later this month, we will hold a test event that will emulate the World Cup Qualification process. This will help us gather valuable learnings to better prepare for the process next year.”

More details about this Winter Royale tournament and Epic’s future plans can be found in the official Announcement page.