Sony and RTS, in a joint partnership, recently acquired the Evolution Championship Series or EVO. EVO is the annual premier fighting video game tournament where thousands of players across the globe compete in a variety of fighting games.

The amount of people who both participate and watch this event is quite large, making it a very marketable event. The founders of EVO, Tom and Tony Canon, will still have an advisory role in the leadership of the company. With all this in mind, this move was a good decision by Sony and benefits the fighting game community.

It may seem like now is not the best time to buy out an in-person tournament, but that is actually far from the truth. Sony knows that their platform was already very popular in the fighting game community. 1.1 billion hours were spent in the fighting game genre in 2020.

This also continues Sony’s push to become the center of the fighting game community. Previously, Sony had made an exclusivity deal with Capcom to make Street Fighter V a PlayStation exclusive. Sony additionally has been broadcasting online fighting game tournaments for a variety of games for months.

This move helped remedy the bad press EVO received in the summer of 2020 when ex-CEO Joey Cuellar was accused of sexual abuse from multiple victims. With him gone and a company with the reputation of Sony, people’s confidence in EVO has been restored.

People in the fighting game community have been worried that the acquisition of EVO from Sony could have a negative impact on the experience of the tournament. However, this is not the case, as Sony has come out and said that they intend to preserve the authentic experience of the tournament and will keep and keeping the tournament an “open-format competition”.

This is shown with Tekken 7 being played on PC for the upcoming online tournament this summer. Sony could easily say that players must compete on their consoles, but instead, they chose to do right by the people competing.

Sony and RTS acquiring EVO is a massive benefit for both the company and the fighting game community. They intend to do right by the fighting game community, to keep the founders close by, and to market their products to thousands of competitors and viewers.