Major League Gaming is looking to expand its horizons, going beyond North America in the near future cooperating with IMG closely.
Some background to those unaware of either organization.
MLG is one of the largest professional gaming scenes, hosting tournament to not only Starcraft, but a slew of other titles for PC including Counter Strike and League of Legends, as well as a truck load of Xbox 360 and PS3 games, like Halo, Call of Duty and a few Tom Clancy titles, as well as common titles like EA Sports, Call of Duty and Battlefield.
IMG is a global sports media corporation based in New York. Their television division is the largest sports media distributor that runs independently.
Essentially, their partnership seems to consist of hosting regional championships, as well as national ones to boot. Plans for 2011 seem to be that they will hold 6 championships in the US with over a 1 million dollar prize pool spread across them all as players compete for their chunk of the change.
To qualify, however, you compete in online "minor leagues" where you will gauge your skill against other players in many of approximated 750,000 matches monthly, and eventually progress into a higher tier.
They have been averaging their registration numbers to about 4000 a month. So far it seems that not only a strong player base has gathered, but over 10 million dollars in funding from a private equity firm alone, bringing the total funding to more than 52 million dollars US.
Regions planned for marketing are Germany, UK, Mexico, France and Eastern Europe, to name a few.
Links
http://reuters.com - Original Story
http://majorleaguegaming.com - MLG's Main Website
http://imgworld.com - IMG's Main Website