Garena has announced that this year’s Free Fire World Series (FFWS) will return to Singapore. Specifically, the international competition will land on Sentosa, a small island on Singapore’s southern coast known for hosting events and attractions. Preliminaries for the offline tournament will be in May with teams from all over the globe vying for the title of world champions.
The 2022 Free Fire World Series will officially kick off on May 14 with the Play-ins. This will pit 12 teams against one another in an attempt to be one of two teams left standing. These final two teams will join the 10 already-qualified teams to compete in the finals on May 21. The finals will see the top-12 battle it out over six rounds across three maps. The point system will be based on the number of kills earned and round rankings. The last team standing will be crowned this year’s champions.
Free Fire is coming off a pretty great 2021. The mobile battle royale game was named “Esports Mobile Game of the Year” at the 2021 Esports Awards for the second year in a row. The game also earned over a billion dollars last year and was the most downloaded game in 2021. Plus, last year’s Free Fire World Series hit record viewership with a peak of 5.4 million concurrent online viewers. Not only was this a personal best for Free Fire, but it is also the record for highest viewership for any esports match in history, excluding Chinese platforms.
Of course, it is not all good news for Garena. Earlier this month it was revealed that Krafton, the publisher of the popular battle royal game PUBG, has sued Garena for alleged IP infringement. According to the lawsuit, Krafton claims that Free Fire has copied several aspects from Battlegrounds including the copyrighted “air drop” feature, weapons, unique objects, and locations. It also points out several similarities regarding in-game textures and color schemes. Krafton is also naming Apple, Google, and YouTube in the suit for their exploitation of the infringement regarding sales and gameplay videos.
It is too early to tell how this suit will play out, but it will likely have no impact on this year’s Free Fire World Series.
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