The Pokémon Company has officially announced its tournament format for the 2025 Pokémon UNITE World Championship, the company’s mobile MOBA game.
Taking place at the Anaheim Arena on August 15th-17th, the top 29 teams compete for a share of its $500,000 (~£372,000) prize pool.
The Pokémon UNITE World Championship will take place concurrently with the other Pokémon-based games at the 2025 Pokémon World Championship. This includes the TCG World Championship, VGC World Championship, and Pokémon GO World Championship.
The competition, which was supposed to feature a total of 32 teams coming from the regional leagues, was reduced to 27 following the withdrawal of five teams: Team TC, Champion Road, and Nova Esports from China, Peru’s INFAMOUS and Korea’s Last Dance.
Nonetheless, the tournament will maintain the same planned format, with the first stage splitting squads into eight groups, each competing in a single round-robin Best-of-three. With the reduced teams, five groups will only feature three teams.
At the end of Day 1, the top two teams from each group will then advance to the playoff phase, where there will be a single-elimination bracket, with best-of-three series until the semi-finals, where teams will move to best-of-five.
From the 16 teams at the start of Day 2, only two teams will be remaining for the Grand Final, which will take place on the third and last day. The last best-of-five will then declare the 2025 World Champions, and the winners will be taking home $100,000 (~£74,279).
Where to watch the Pokémon UNITE Championship Series
The competition will be streamed on the official Twitch and YouTube channels, with official broadcasts available in English, South Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese.
Last year’s competition saw a total of 76,308 peak viewers, according to data platform Esports Charts, with viewership averaging around 33,000 people.
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