Riot Games Partners with Nerd Street Gamers and Spectacor Gaming to Expand All-Women VALORANT™ Tournament into $50K Official Ignition Series Event, September 11-13

The FTW Summer Showdown Features Largest-Ever Women’s Tournament Prize Pool Sponsored by Riot, T1 and G FUEL

The Three-Day Event Creates Unique Opportunities for Amateurs and Aspiring Pro Gamers to Showcase Talent in New Emerging Esport

PHILADELPHIA – SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 – Nerd Street Gamers and Spectacor Gaming are partnering with Riot Games to make the largest all-women VALORANT tournament even bigger – expanding the original one-day, eight-team event to a three-day, twelve-team tournament and raising the stakes from $10,000 to a $50,000 prize pool over the course of September 11-13. In addition to T1 Entertainment & Sports and G FUEL, The Official Energy Drink of Esports®, Riot Games joins the lineup of event sponsors in their latest move to make the FTW Summer Showdown an official VALORANT Ignition Series event.

To view and/or download an image that supports this announcement, click here.

“The VALORANT Ignition Series is all about showcasing the best talent of our community, and we want to use our platform to celebrate those who do great things,” said Anna Donlon, Executive Producer of VALORANT at Riot Games. “Competing as a female in games is a daunting task for many reasons, so when we heard of Nerd Street Gamers’ and Spectacor Gaming’s FTW Summer Showdown, we knew we wanted to throw our support behind the tournament and elevate it to the level of our VALORANT Ignition Series.”

The FTW Summer Showdown features eight amateur, professional and content creator teams that have been extended an invitation, with an additional four amateur team spots that were secured through a qualifier tournament. GALorants, a women’s VALORANT Discord community, hosted the qualifier tournament on Saturday, September 5, where the winning teams secured a portion of the $1,000 prize pot and the best four teams will face off against top female VALORANT players and streamers in the official $50,000 Showdown taking place September 11-13.

VALORANT fans can tune in to the FTW Summer Showdown competition on Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13 starting at 5PM ET each day on twitch.tv/nerdstgamers. Broadcast production and tournament operations will be powered by Nerd Street Gamers.

The FTW Summer Showdown tournament is part of a larger inclusion initiative, FTW: For The Women. Spectacor Gaming launched its women in gaming resource group in 2019 to connect, support, and inspire the growth and advancement of women across all sectors of the gaming landscape. FTW has expanded its partnership with Nerd Street Gamers to help foster a dynamic amateur-to-pro pipeline, furthering its mission to champion an inclusive space for women and their allies by empowering them through networking, professional growth opportunities, and tournaments that help drive the industry forward.

The VALORANT Ignition Series is a global series of tournaments created by Riot Games in partnership with players, teams, content creators and tournament organizers designed to give fans their first taste of high stakes competitive play. The series kicked off in June, and Nerd Street Gamers has powered an array of Ignition Series events, most notably including the T1 x Nerd Street Gamers VALORANT Showdown and FaZe Clan VALORANT Invitational. The FTW Summer Showdown is the first all-women VALORANT tournament to join the Ignition Series lineup and serves as one of the largest prize pools in female esports tournament history.

###

About Nerd Street Gamers

Nerd Street Gamers is a national network of esports facilities and events dedicated to powering competitive opportunities for gamers. The company promotes greater access to the esports industry, laying a national framework for esports talent development and high-quality gaming tournaments. NSG has received backing from Five Below, Comcast, SeventySix Capital, Elevate Ventures, and angel investor George Miller.

For more information, follow @nerdstgamers on Twitter or visit nerdstgamers.com.

About Spectacor Gaming

Spectacor Gaming is a North American gaming and esports organization that is a division of Comcast NBCUniversal. Spectacor Gaming owns and operates the Philadelphia Fusion, which competes in Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League and is the first professional esports organization to represent the City of Philadelphia. In addition, Spectacor Gaming has created FTW: For The Women, a resource group dedicated to connecting, supporting, and inspiring the growth and advancement of women across all sectors of the gaming landscape. Spectacor Gaming is owned and operated by Comcast Spectacor, a professional sports and live entertainment company based in Philadelphia and an invested partner of T1 Entertainment & Sports and Nerd Street Gamers.

About VALORANT

VALORANT is a competitive 5v5 character-based tactical shooter for the PC developed by Riot Games. VALORANT is a precise and lethal multiplayer game with high-fidelity gunplay, a diverse arsenal of guns, agents with unique abilities, and competitively tuned maps for thousands of hours of play.

VALORANT is a free-to-play game and optimized to perform on a wide variety of PC hardware, allowing for a global audience to compete. Demonstrated by the game’s best-in-class game server quality, global infrastructure, and proprietary anti-cheat technology, Riot Games is committed to preserving the core tenets of the tactical shooter genre and upholding the competitive integrity of the gameplay experience.

About Riot Games

Riot Games was founded in 2006 to develop, publish, and support the most player-focused games in the world. In 2009, Riot released its debut title, League of Legends, to worldwide acclaim. League has gone on to be the most-played PC game in the world and a key driver of the explosive growth of esports.

As League enters its second decade, Riot continues to evolve the game while delivering new experiences to players with VALORANT, Legends of Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics, League of Legends: Wild Rift, and multiple work-in-progress titles, while exploring the world of Runeterra through multimedia projects across music, comic books, TV, and more. Founded by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, Riot is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and has 2,500+ Rioters in 20+ offices worldwide.

About T1 Entertainment & Sports

T1 Entertainment & Sports is a global esports joint venture that owns and operates the ultra-successful T1 League of Legends (LoL) Champions Korea (LCK) team, along with teams and players in competitive gaming segments that include Valorant, Fortnite, Dota 2, PUBG, Super Smash Bros., Hearthstone, Apex Legends, Overwatch, and FIFA Online 4. The T1 LoL LCK team, previously known as SK Telecom T1, has won three LoL World Championships (2013, 2015, 2016). T1 unites esports enthusiasts around the world through its gaming culture and lifestyle, content creation, entertainment and merchandise. SK Telecom and Comcast Spectacor launched T1 in October 2019 and have global operations based in Seoul, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. For more information on T1, please visit T1.gg.

About G FUEL
As The Official Energy Drink of Esports®, G FUEL provides gamers with a healthier, more performance-driven alternative to standard energy drink products. With an ever-expanding, sugar-free product lineup that includes a powdered energy formula, ready-to-drink cans, a hydration formula, and edible energy crystals, G FUEL has firmly established itself as the market leader in the gamer energy drink industry.

With over 200,000 5-star Shopper Approved Ratings, a shipping network that spans over 125 countries, a newly-forged nationwide retail campaign, and a global social media footprint of over 400 million followers, G FUEL maintains the industry’s largest and most passionate community of fans, customers, content creators, and partners. Content creators and partners who include the likes of NoisyButters, FaZe Clan, Luminosity Gaming, PewDiePie, David Dobrik, Summit1G, NICKMERCS, xQc, KSI, Roman Atwood, Bethesda Game Studios, HYPEMAKER, DXRacer, Scuf Gaming, SteelSeries, and Digital Storm.

Join the movement today at GFUEL.com and follow us on social media @GFuelEnergy.

Media Contacts:

Brownstein Group on behalf of Nerd Street Gamers
nerdstreet@brownsteingroup.com

Kelsey Rowley
Spectacor Gaming
Kelsey_Rowley@comcastspectacor.com

Jacqui Collins
Riot Games
jcollins@riotgames.com

G FUEL Press Contact
media@gfuel.com

G FUEL Distribution and Wholesale Contact
jim@gfuel.com