Insomnia Gaming Festival returns next month – and its line-up of esports tournaments have been unveiled.
Insomnia68 (aka i68) will feature four main esports competitions, in League of Legends, CSGO, Overwatch and – for the first time – Valorant.
The tournaments have a scaling prize pool, which rises based on the number of teams that participate in each game.
They are BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) Open tournaments, so anyone can sign up and take part at the event, which takes place from April 15th to 18th 2022 at the Birmingham NEC.
League of Legends (LoL) and Valorant will each have a minimum £3,000 prize pool (rising to £5,000 with 48 teams), while Overwatch will have £3,750 and CSGO £5,000 (rising to £6,250 with 64 teams).
Players must be aged 16 and above to take part in the tournaments.
At the most recent Insomnia, pre-covid, now-defunct UK esports org Nox won the Insomnia65 League of Legends final.
The competitions will likely be broadcast by Insomnia Gaming Festival. In terms of other teams or broadcasters livestreaming the matches, the official Insomnia esports rules state: “Any other broadcasting of tournament matches is forbidden without the express written permission of a Player1 Events employee.”
There will also be community intermediate tournaments in the same four games – Overwatch, CSGO, LoL and Valorant – with first prize being £50 per player.
Then, there are casual BYOC tournaments in Golf With Your Friends, Age of Empires 4, Starcraft 2 and more.
Insomnia esports manager Kharne said Rocket League may come back to Insomnia next time, and was omitted due to Psyonix’s new stricter Rocket League community tournament rules.
The BYOC Open tournaments are separate to the NSE university esports finals, which will also be held at i68.
There’s also the Arena Clash finals taking place in Overwatch (Stratford Spartans vs Manchester Swarm), League of Legends (Stratford Spartans vs Leicester Raptors), Tekken (Kingston Harriers vs Bradford Rams) and Valorant (Wrexham Reapers vs Birmingham Defenders).
It will be interesting to see how many teams sign up to the tournaments. Several have told ENUK they may not be attending due to higher ticket prices at Insomnia68.
ENUK will be in attendance – let us know if you’re around as we’ll be looking for teams and personalities to conduct video interviews with as usual.
There’s more info on the i68 esports tournaments and sign up info here.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
