At this year’s GDC, Jason Ronald, head of Xbox Advanced Technology Group announced the new program, Xbox Live Tournaments Platform. This tool will allow game developers, players and esports teams to create their own tournaments via Xbox Live.

Designed to make tournaments easier for developers to integrate into games, the Xbox Live Tournaments Platform will work similar to Xbox Live’s built-in matchmaking capabilities. Xbox will handle all the arbitration, registration, queuing and notifications. All that’s left for the developer to do is decide how they want to integrate tournaments into their games.

Not just for developers, this platform was also built with esports teams and everyday gamers in mind too. Ronald announced that they have already partnered up with esports networks, ESL and FaceIt.

As for the non-esports gamers, Chad Gibson, group program manager at Xbox Live, gave the example of Rocket League as a game that he thinks would work for Xbox Tournaments. “I’m a huge Rocket League player, but I’m not amazing,” Gibson told Polygon. “I would love to play a tournament with my friends. I would love to be able to say, ‘Hey, guys. This Friday, why don’t the eight of us play a single elimination, one-on-one tournament and see who wins?'”

He went on to explain that tournaments could also be used so players can work together on a game. Friends could join each other to try and achieve things they couldn’t do alone and climb further up the leaderboards.

A preview software development kit is available now for developers to start testing, with a final version coming later this year.

Source: Polygon