NBC Sports detailed plans for its debut into the world of esports, launching a deal with Psyonix and FACEIT for a new Rocket League series. With coverage spanning multiple NBCUniversal and FACEIT assets, including NBC’s RSNs, Telemundo Deportes, NBCUniversal International Networks and more, the 2v2 Rocket League tournament will dangle a $100,000 prize pool for contenders, with the tournament beginning on the FACEIT platform with regional online qualifiers, which will be divided into competitions for all eight NBC Sports Regional Networks, as well as additional American and European open qualifying regions. Competitors in the RSN regions will then move on to in-studio regional final competitions at select RSNs, and the tournament will culminate in a two-day Grand Finals with coverage of the Regional and Grand Finals across a variety of NBCUniversal and Comcast national and international platforms. In total, more than 40 hours of event coverage will be presented across live-streaming, video-on-demand, and linear platforms.

“We felt that working with the two of them with this model that we’ve come up with, would open up esports to a broad, wide community group of people, both with existing gamers as well as bringing new viewers to the table. We really wanted to bring this to everyone to have a chance to be a player and not just a spectator. We like that this is one of the things that make esports unique, and we can now open it up to both the players who you may have already heard of, as well as some who you haven’t heard of.”

The Grand Finals will feature 16 total teams competing on August 26-27 for the inaugural title and the $100,000 prize pool, which will be televised live in the U.S. on NBCSN. The Grand Finals will also be broadcast on Syfy in the UK, Germany, Australia and multiple countries across Latin America, in addition to all previously listed streaming outlets.

“We’ve been speaking with a number of publishers over the past couple of years, and have explored many different opportunities and ideas as we were trying to find our way into this space. We think that this particular platform is one that is flexible and can be repeated year-in, year-out, and potentially multiple times year. We can see ourselves fitting lots of different game genres and titles into this format. We are still looking at other opportunities in esports.”