Lisa Geiran, UCD; Barry Dolan, Shamrock Rovers FC, Karina Kelly, UCD.
- €25,000 in prizes
- Xbox gaming centers to be roll-out "across Ireland"
A computer games football tournament with a prize fund of over €25,000 was launched in Dublin today, it is one of the largest marketing spends on a games competition in Ireland to date.
The tournament, named the M&M’s Challenge 2007, will be played using Pro Evolution Soccer 6 on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 games console, and will take place in the Xbox Live Gaming Centre in Dublin city centre.
It has backing from sponsors M&M’s and Reebok, and will have 13 qualification events, in which gamers will fight it out to become one of 64 finalists to gain entry to the knockout rounds on the Sunday of the June Bank Holiday, and the finals the next day .
Registration vie A2Zsoccer.com will close on Thursday May 23. The Qualifications will kick of on April 22 and run till Thursday May 31. There is a ‘entrance fee’ which costs €10.
According to the organisers all finalists will receive prizes, including games, and Reebok products. Higher prizes include 26" HD TVs, and Xbox hardware, while the overall winners will get an ‘Xbox Home Cinema’, and for the club, school, or collage of their choosing Reebok kit for 15 players.
The organisers say that the event is the largest football gaming competition ever held in the country.
With media partners Evening Herald and Spin 1038, the new promotion comes just after the recent launch of the rival Sony PlayStation 3 which was backed by a massive advertisement spend.
The critical acclaimed Pro Evolution Soccer 6, developed and published by Konami, is the rival the FIFA games by games publishing giant Electronic Arts (EA) who retain localised channels for retail, marketing, and PR in Ireland.
The gaming centre is open to the public and for group booking, it also used by games companies for launches. Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Ubisoft and Activision have used the venue in the past. A statement for the company says “The company's roll-out across Ireland will begin this summer with the opening of our second centre in a Dublin suburb before roll-out nationwide in 2007/08”.
The Xbox Live Gaming Centre is at 51 South William Street, Dublin 2. The PESRankings.com will be used to track the events.
The Xbox Live Gaming Centre is owned by Irish Multiplayer Holdings Ltd, founded by Frank O'Grady and Dylan Collins. Multiplayer Holdings Ltd is backed by private investors, whose names include O’Grady, and a former Smurfit Group chief financial officer, Tony Ritchie.
Collins is also a founder and chief executive of Dublin based games middleware provider Demonware. He recently completed a multi-million-euro sale deal of the company with publisher Activision. The Sunday Business Post reported that the deal was understood to be less than €10 million, but a large return for investors who spent less then €1 million in the company.
Comments