Facebook now has tools for esports tournaments organization

For several years now, Facebook is trying hard to enter esports and gaming in general. That's not something new, as "Facebook games" were a thing basically as old as Facebook itself, but the strategy they are doing in the last couple of years is beyond that.

Earlier this week, Facebook Gaming introduced Facebook Tournaments, a new tool for Tournament organization, integrated directly into Facebook Gaming.

This new tool allows users to create brackets, manage participants, and organize tournaments all in one place on Facebook. Players can register themselves if it's an open event, or organizer can send invites directly to people. Organizers can also register players who don't have Facebook profiles, but those players would not be able to access brackets, leaderboards and other stuff within the tournament page.

Since "Tournaments" are integrated directly into Facebook Gaming, this means you can stream the event directly on the Facebook streaming platform, or, for example, content creators and streamers can organize fan tournaments with their viewers.

Facebook says that one of the key points they are working on is to "offer better discovery and functionality for tournament participants and everything critically important for tournament organizers."

Currently, FT support Single elimination, Double Elimination and Round Robin, but they say they are working on more formats, including Swiss. Still, that's a lot less than other established platforms are offering, like Toornament, Battlefy, FACEIT and others.

This tool is still in early access and actively being worked on, so we will have to wait and see how it will develop. On paper, a comprehensive aspect of it looks quite appealing, with everything at one place, from the social media aspect to streaming, organizing and sharing the event. Still, it all depends on other tools Facebook will add to support it.

Facebook is trying hard to enter the esports market, with some big stars, like DisguisedToast, signing streaming deals with Facebook Gaming, but the big problem is that general esports/gaming audience is simply not fond of watching competitive gaming streams on Facebook. The deal between Facebook and ESL in 2018 was a notoriously bad example of esports events on Facebook, which led to an almost complete fiasco for many big CS:GO and Dota 2 events that year, with 10 to 15 times smaller viewer numbers than it would be if the events were on Twitch.