Facebook Gaming launches ‘Tournaments’ feature to promote social distancing

Facebook Gaming on Tuesday announced rolling out "Tournaments" feature for all users. As the name implies, it allows gamers to set up their own tournaments and play with their friends online. Gamers can add other people in their tournaments as well.

With the 'Tournaments', gamers can organise a proper gaming event which includes registration for singles or teams, seeding, and score entry. The feature allows you to create multiple tournament styles such as single elimination, double elimination, and round robin.

Facebook's Tournament feature is intended to help the company setup an e-sports platform. The company said that the early roll-out of the feature is aimed at helping gamers and casual gaming enthusiasts to connect during the Covid-19 lockdown in many countries, and also encourage social distancing.

"Our mission for Facebook gaming is to build the world's gaming community and organized gameplay has always been a big part of gaming, regardless of levels of competition… Whether it's someone getting together with family and friends or whether it's a creator of a tournament for viewers or supporters, or whether it's an esports organization, this is a big part of gaming," Mina Abouseif, the engineer behind Tournaments, told VentureBeat.

Facebook's new feature is also said to be part of the initiative by the World Health Organisation to encourage gaming as well as social distancing.

The WHO last month announced a partnership with the gaming industry to launch a "Play Apart Together" campaign to encourage social distancing as well as connect with each other online. Activision Blizzard, Twitch, Riot Games, and YouTube Gaming are some of the top names part of this campaign.

"It's never been more critical to ensure people stay safely connected to one another. Games are the perfect platform because they connect people through the lens of joy, purpose and meaning. We are proud to participate in such a worthwhile and necessary initiative," said Activision CEO Bobby Kotick in a statement.