“Call of Duty” 2014 Championship Hands Out A Million Bucks for Gaming

32 teams, a million bucks and countless kills.

As millions of people spent their days off watching their brackets get busted in the NCAA Tourney, a different tournament raged in Los Angeles as the Call of Duty World Championships took place over the weekend. 32 teams from all over the world descended on the city of angels to duke it out in 4v4 mayhem, competing for a million dollar prize purse.

These are no casual players either. As competition in the ESports arena has reached new heights, teams are seeing corporate sponsorship become the norm and increased interest from eager owners who want to get in on the ground floor of the rising popularity of the pastime, staking teams and reaping the rewards of prize purses, merchandising, and YouTube revenues. This isn’t just gaming, it’s big business.

And to the victor goes the spoils. We weren’t just astounded by the seven-figure prize purse, we were floored by how much fun we had watching the matches unfold, rooting for teams, and gasping along with the crowd when last minute headshots pushed games into overtime. There’s definitely a reason these teams have thousands of followers on Twitter.

In the end, a team called Complexity (@compLexityLive) took home the grand prize. If you’re interested in seeing how it went down, you can check out recaps of the entire COD Championship Tournament at Major League Gaming’s siteor on your Xbox’s MLG app. And if you’re interested in trying your hand at playing Call of Duty for cold hard cash, we highly recommend snagging the COD: Ghosts community app as a good first step. After all, you’re gonna play COD anyway, you might as well try to get paid for it.

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