Over the last year, Sony has been ramping up its presence in the world of esports with the acquisition of fighting game tournament Evolution Championship Series (Evo), hosting its own PlayStation Tournaments, and most recently launching a line of PC gaming monitors and accessories called InZone, which could appeal to streamers and esports enthusiasts. Complementing these moves, in the last month, Sony officially acquired tournament platform Repeat.gg, which enables gamers to compete in both free and paid entry tournaments.  

Repeat.gg, founded in 2015, claims that it has hosted over 75,000 tournaments with more than 4.35 million participants. The “all-in-one” platform has worked with Totino’s Pizza Rolls, Papa John’s, the US Army, GameStop, and gaming peripherals brand Turtle Beach to help facilitate their tournaments. Repeat’s technology automates much of the process for companies who want to get involved in esports by managing tournaments, offering live tracking of rankings, fulfilling payments/prizes, and providing a dashboard that looks at marketing analytics. Repeat.gg also provides tools for brands to engage users.

For Sony, having a dedicated esports platform should enable PlayStation to reach an even broader audience while bringing more amateur players into the field. “At PlayStation, our vision for esports has always been about breaking down barriers for gamers to compete at all levels,” commented Steven Roberts, vice president of global competitive gaming at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Repeat.gg will benefit from the additional resources its new parent company brings to the table, but the tournament platform isn’t suddenly going to back away from games on platforms outside the PlayStation ecosystem, as Repeat.gg executives noted that the platform intends to continue supporting mobile, PC, and other consoles. That’s a smart move given the continued blurring of platform lines and that Sony also intends to expand more and more into both PC and mobile.

Adding Repeat.gg to the PlayStation family could help the gaming division catch up with Microsoft and Nintendo, which currently see a slightly bigger percentage of their respective bases competing in amateur video game tournaments. Interpret’s New Media Measure® shows that 20% of PlayStation console owners have participated in non-professional esports tournaments in the past three months, which is ahead of general gamers (18%) but behind Xbox and Switch owners (both 21%).

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