The Street Fighter V World Championship is taking place on the final day of the Evolution Championship Series (EVO) tournament in Las Vegas later this month, and now ESPN has announced plans to broadcast the event live on television via its ESPN2 cable network.
This is a big deal for the fighting game community, because it’s the first Street Fighter V tournament at Evo (Capcom only released the game earlier this year) and the first time such a tournament has been broadcast on live TV.
And interest in Street Fighter V seems to be high, as over 5,000 competitors have registered to play the game at Evo this year. That’s more than twice the number of people who registered to play Street Fighter IV at Evo last year (2,227) and almost double the player count of Evo 2016’s second most popular game, Super Smash Bros. Wii U (which has 2,637 competitors.)
While ESPN’s new eSports team will be reporting on Evo as a whole, the company will only be televising the Street Fighter V finals on Sunday of Evo weekend. While Evo itself takes place in the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Sunday finals are for the first time being held in a much bigger venue — the Mandalay Bay sports arena.