Team Vitality have announced the acquisition of Bigetron Esports who will act as a mobile gaming division for the organisation under the name ‘Bigetron by Vitality’.
The merger sees the Bigetron’s rosters for Free Fire, Honor of Kings, PUBG Mobile (PUBGM), and both mens and womens teams in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) now playing under this new umbrella.
However, at this year’s record-breaking $70m (£52.7m) Esports World Cup the teams will compete solely under Team Vitality’s name.
Bigetron have established themselves as one of the major entities in Southeast Asia’s esports scene.
They have over 6.8m social media followers across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp and their Southeast Asian brand ambassadors have a combined social media following of over 27 million.
According to their website, Bigetron have also won over 150 national titles and two world titles in PUBGM: the PUBGM World Championship (PMCO) in 2019 and the PUBG Mobile World League: West in 2020.
Their Women’s MLBB team were already acquired by Vitality last year just before the inaugural Esports World Cup. The roster had gone undefeated for three years across 24 tournaments before losing in the EWC final to Smart Omega Empress.
In their official statement, Vitality claims this deal is part of their path to becoming “one of the only truly international esports organisations.”
Bigetron founder and CEO Edwin Chia will remain with the organisation and spearhead the mobile esports division in Indonesia alongside Team Vitality’s Co-founder/CEO Nicolas Maurer and Director of Global Operations Danny Engels.
In an interview of Team Vitality and Bigetron staff with Esports Insider, Vitality Co-CEO Vas Roberts stated Bigertron were the “pretty obvious choice” for realising that plan:
“We now have additional skill sets and knowledge from different regions. We can learn just as much from Bigetron as they can learn from us.”
However, Roberts stresses they aren’t looking to change much about their new partners:
“Edwin (Chia) has built a fantastic business which has a really strong community that loves and has an emotional connection with the brand.
“So you don’t want to disrupt that DNA or that tone of voice or how they communicate with them.”
This is just one of many acquistions esports teams have recently made competing in the Esports World Cup Club Championship which alone has a prize pool of $27m (£20m).
The 40 competing clubs had to publically sign players/teams they want to enter into the Esports World Cup before the deadline on May 15th.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
