Since Halo Infinite’s launch nearly 1 year ago the community has been contributing crowdfunded dollars to the Halo esports ecosystem. Up to this point, nearly $500,000 has already gone directly towards boosting prize pools of official HCS events - and that doesn’t include funds that have gone directly to partnered teams from the sale of cosmetics in their store. This is remarkable. Thank you to everyone who has contributed up to this point. Partway through the season, based on the community feedback, we realized there was an opportunity to use the crowdfunding to have a greater impact on the ecosystem at large, rather than just a few select tournaments. This led us to begin working with partnered teams to see where we could support and the result was boosting the FaZe prize pool to $75,000 back in April, as well as working with eUnited to fund the Grunt Classic tournament that just took place last month. Supporting partnered teams in this way has proven to be a powerful route to take as we can elevate the work that they’re doing, and even fill in gaps in the roadmap with all new tournaments.   

Going forward, we’re going to continue this new philosophy in an effort to bolster the roadmap and add new events all together, rather than boosting what are already very large prize pools. Overall, we believe this holistic approach will result in more opportunities for players, as well as more content and entertainment for fans to watch. Ultimately, we feel this will drive a larger impact across the entire ecosystem, rather than putting so many eggs in one basket. And on top of all this, we’re going to be increasing the HaloWC FFA Prize Pool from $5,000 to $25,000. Finally, with all that said we’re excited to offer our biggest prize pool of the year at HaloWC with $1,000,000 on the line, of which $400,000 goes to first place alone.  

So, what’s next? We’ve already begun working with the partnered teams to add more events to the roadmap and we’ll be sharing more details live at the Halo World Championship, along with initial roadmap details for Year 2 of the Halo Championship Series. Like with Year 1, our aim is to publicly announce the entire Year 2 roadmap before all of the Official HCS competition begins, and we’ll be releasing more info following the Halo World Championship this year.  

Once again, we want to say thank you to everyone in the community that has supported HCS. From the fans, to the players, the teams, and all of our partners – thank you.   

The Halo World Championship begins October 20 with the Play-In Stage of the tournament with the Main Event taking place October 21-23 live from the Seattle Convention Center. We hope you all enjoy the show and for those attending the event, we’ll see you there! To see all the latest HaloWC info including schedule and the full FAQ head to the event page on Halo.gg.