Penta Esports aims to lead and develop grassroot esports by providing opportunities to aspiring esports athletes. The first initiative in this regard, the Penta Amateur League, designed exclusively for amateur and semi-professional players, recorded a successful first season garnering more than 7.6 lakh viewership, with an overall watch-time of more than 34 lakh minutes. With an aim to go beyond metros, to tier two and three cities, the platform will enable the amateurs to carve a career as esports athletes.
The Penta Amateur League’s season one launched in October 2021 and concluded in March 2022 with a total of Rs 30,00,000 distributed in prize pool. It featured multiple esports titles across mobile, PC and consoles each month which were World Cricket Championship 3, Gran Turismo Sport, Valorant, Battlegrounds Mobile India, Free Fire, Pokemon Unite, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Tekken 7, Clash Royale and Brawl Stars.
The league had 76 match days and 24 days of broadcast, including the ‘Penta Talk Show’ preceding every month’s broadcast. The matches from the league were broadcast on multiple platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Loco and Booyah, culminating in more than 116 hours of total broadcast with a peak concurrent viewership of 6,853. Social media posts about the league across social media platforms of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter had a cumulative engagement of 24 per cent.
Said Penta Esports founder and CEO Anurag Khurana, “We launched the first edition of the ‘Penta Amateur League’ with a vision to provide opportunities to budding esports athletes across titles and platforms. This will give further impetus to the growing esports ecosystem of India and contribute to sector growth.”
Said Penta Esports co-founder and head of esports Kiran Noojibail, “Our objective with Penta Amateur League was to incentivise esports enthusiasts to start and continue their grind to becoming an esports athlete irrespective of the game and platform. We are ecstatic with the response for season one and plan to announce season two of the league in the coming weeks.”
The finals of each month were preceded by music performances by indie artists, like Gamini Khurana, Sushant Satija, Ashter X, Saahil Bhargava, Anindita Dey, Muktak Kanjilal and LiveIn Blues.
The entire registration and scheduling of the league was carried on Penta Esports’ platform, Pentaesports.com.