Multiplay revealed today that Roccat will be the headline sponsor of the i56 Counter Strike:Global Offensive tournament, fronting £7,500 in cash which will be spread across the top 8 teams. Roccat will also be providing hardware prize, though there is no word yet on which products will be up for grabs and how far the products will be spread among the top finishers. The peripheral’s company put up the same amount of prize money for i55 also, so with iSeries moving to a larger venue, teams were hoping that the prize pools would increase too. Multiplay have already announced a $30,000 (roughly £19,500) Hearthstone tournament, which is a massive leap from the £3,000 of i55.
With this being the winter iteration of the event, the attendance often suffers and as such jumping into a high prize pool may not be the wisest move just yet. The previous winter event only had a £4,000 prize pool for CS:GO, which was split between two sponsors, so it is a healthy sign to see one sponsor top that and still have the possibility open for a second sponsor to push the prize pool closer to the £10,000 mark. The possibility of even further increase still remains to be seen. So far there are just 16 teams known to be going to this event which gives them a whopping 50% chance of walking away with some money and perhaps hardware, but there are still lots of space for more teams to sign up and be in with a shot. With just three weeks until the event kicks off, sign ups need to shoot up soon or we could be seeing one of the worst iSeries CS:GO attendances in quite some time.
