Overwatch Open Winners Will Nab $100,000 This Week

One of the biggest tournaments so far of Overwatch [official site] is happening this week, with a total prize pool of $300,000. We told you about it a couple of months ago but, silly you, you’ve forgotten. The Overwatch Open has already seen one day of North American regionals, kicking off yesterday, with the second day of games happening right now. But Europe and the grand final itself is yet to come. Here's the schedule and details of how to watch it.

If you’re quick enough you can catch the rest of today’s North American matches on Twitch right now. Eight NA teams have been Reapering and Dva’ing their hearts out, vying to reach the grand final. Tomorrow there’ll be a break in the events. But on Wednesday the European teams will come out of their locker rooms, presumably after smashing everything inside in an idle surge of wanton destruction. Those eight teams will play their regional matches over two days. Then, on Friday, everything comes to a close in the grand final, where the winning team from each region will shoot sleep darts and molten steel at each other for the $100,000 grand prize, while the remaining cash is shared out to the runners-up.

For a breakdown on how the whole thing works, see the Open’s website. We are mostly interested to see if Overwatch can be decent in terms of a spectator sport, considering it’s hard to see everything happening on the map from one character’s viewpoint. But the broadcasters seem to be taking it seriously. Just look at the size of this desk.

This isn’t the only Overwatch competition on the cards. The Overwatch World Cup will be hosting its finals at Blizzcon in November, but the prize for the winners there is a sense of national pride (and, of course, the paid trip to Blizzcon). And in other news, Symmetra (the game's least-used hero) will soon be getting a boost, according to lead designer Jeff Kaplan.

"She is a hero we’d like to make some changes to," he told Business Insider. "I think those changes wouldn’t see the light of day until November, though, because we want to do a bunch of internal testing."

Happy days if you’re a fan of harassing people with tiny, annoying laser turrets.