2015 Season: A New Leap for Philippine Crossfire

GameClub Philippines, the publishers of the first-person shooter (FPS) Crossfire (CF), has announced three major tournaments in addition to the national qualifiers for this year’s Crossfire Stars (CFS) tournament. CFS is considered to be the franchise’s premier tournament, featuring teams from all over the world.

To start with, the game producer, in partnership with Mineski, is hosting the “Mineski Rivals Series.” The series is basically a tournament that will run for two seasons throughout the year and will boast a prize pool of P280,000. Each season will feature P140,000 in prizes, with the champion getting the lion’s share of P50,000 and cash prizes up to eighth place at P5,000.

Then, TheNetCafe (TnC) will collaborate with GameClub to form the TnC eSports Cup 2015. While the Mineski-based competition boasts a “free-for-all” format, the TnC eSports Cup 2015 will be divided into two categories: Season and Pro-Season. This system allows up-and-coming teams to be able to gain berths in the final round without having to bear the pressure of dealing with established squads. The Grand Finals will have a pool of P250,000 and eight teams will be able to get into the money.

Finally, the Philippine eSports Organization (PeSO) joins forces with GameClub to offer the Razer NeXT 2015 Crossfire Tournament. Unlike the other two tournaments, Razer NeXT follows a wave format that will run from April to September. It will have a total of P180,000 in cash and each wave will have a P30,000 prize pool.

The tournament is divided into the Northern and Southern Conferences, where teams will play their games at designated partner cafes all over the country.

This year’s national qualifiers for the Crossfire Stars Grand Finals is set to start this April. Details have not been officially released yet but it is safe to assume that the prizes will also be more or less similar to the pools of the three tournaments stated above.

These tournaments have a combined total of more than P600,000 and a team can theoretically win P320,000 should they secure top finishes in all three competitions. This does not include the figures for the CFS National Qualifiers as well as the CFS Grand Finals itself if that team happens to become the representative for the Philippines.

Everyone was shocked last year when Pacific.Macta grabbed third place in the last edition of the CFS held in Seoul, South Korea, beating teams such as PENTA eSports from Germany and EP from China. As an up-and-coming team, they were mostly viewed as the dark horses of the tournament; however, they proved more than capable of continuing the strong Filipino tradition in the FPS franchise.

The team builds up on the legacy left by teams such as Pacific.Wara and MSIEvoGT as both of these squads grabbed similar places in major international CF tournaments around the world. However, even though all of these three teams have reached at least the semi-final round in past tournaments, none of these teams have been able to grab the trophy for the Philippines.

These three tournaments gives Filipino teams a chance to improve their game sense, bolster their team chemistry, increase their confidence and most importantly, test their strategies against the best that the country can offer.

It is clear that GameClub puts a lot of effort in uplifting the level of Crossfire and FPS in general in the Philippines. Whether these efforts will be enough to bring the top bacon back to the country in the upcoming years is yet to be seen.

CrossFire is an online tactical FPS for the PC by South Korean developer SmileGate. The game is currently the largest and bestselling FPS title in China, where it is published and distributed by Tencent.

eSports by INQUIRER.net is a news and media website made in partnership by the Philippine eSports Organization and the Inquirer News Group.

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