With a filing date of 07/31/2015, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. has registered a new trademark entitled ‘Compete’. No official details have been revealed in conjunction with this filing, but the identification portion of the trademark has given some details into what Blizzard is working on.
– a section from the official trademark filing
Blizzard is looking to inject eSports support for their products by “Providing an online non-downloadable Internet-based system application featuring technology enabling users to organize and promote e-sports tournaments, to create and customize tournament brackets and ladders, track tournament progress, maintain related statistics, and post results.”
Currently, Blizzard’s leading product in the eSports arena is its popular trading card game Hearthstone with an estimated 30 million players as of May 2015. Complaints about the lack of a supported tournament mode have been rampant since the game’s release on March 11, 2014 and during the games beta phase in the months preceding its official release.
Blizzard has had much success in eSports with their powerhouse real-time strategy series Starcraft and the competitive arena portion of their MMO World of Warcraft. While both of these games have fallen behind in the eSports race to games like League of Legends and Counter-strike: Global Offensive, perhaps a concept like ‘Compete’ will be what they need to bring a wider intrigue to their products as eSports.
