Hi-Rez Studios released the final rundown from this past weekend's SMITE World Championship, which had a total prize pot of $2,612,610 – the third largest prize pool in eSports history to date. Eight teams met for battle in Atlanta's Cobb Performing Arts Center in Hi-Rez's hometown. In case you missed it, we were there covering all the things and collaborated with a few of our sister sites to bring the celebrating up a notch. Since its release, SMITE has become one of the biggest names in MOBAs and eSports. Now, Hi-Rez is ramping up its Xbox One launch for later this year. Currently, the beta has had 170,000 signups since its announcement at SWC. Along with these numbers, Hi-Rez sent over a neat infographic, as well as their new cinematic trailer – accessed over one million times during SMITE World Championship.

The grand finale climaxed on Sunday with a nail-biting game five tie-breaker between North American Cognitive Prime and Europe’s Titan, with Cognitive Prime ultimately prevailing. The final day of the SWC brought in over a million unique viewers on SMITE’s official Twitch channel, making it the top-viewed channel across all of Twitch. In addition to the packed auditorium that watched the tournament live from Atlanta’s Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, close to 2.9 million cumulative daily unique viewers (the sum total of each day’s unique viewer count) tuned in to watch the event online – nearly one viewer for every dollar at stake for the players.

As the winners of the SWC, Cognitive Prime took home the lion’s share of the $2,612,610 prize pool, of which over $2 million was raised via crowdfunding through SMITE’s in-game promotion, the Odyssey. For its first place finish, Cognitive Prime was awarded $1,306,130 in cash plus the mammoth SMITE World Championship trophy. Titan earned $522,452 as the runner-up, with Cognitive Red and SK Gaming winning $391,839 and $261,226 for third and fourth places, respectively. The bottom four teams each received $32,653.

For such a relatively young game, it's definitely impressive to see this huge of a turnout for SMITE World Championship #1. Just imagine how much of a big deal next year's World Championship will be.  I know Sardu and Xerin have enjoyed talking about it quite a bit, and that's not even including how much they and our other staff have been writing about it. By this time next year, SMITE will be in the hands of far more gamers, which means that even more teams will be all clamoring to Atlanta (well, if it's held there again, I'm just guessing here) to duke it out for first place. I'm wondering if next year will bring an even larger prize pot. Why settle for being the third largest prize pool when you can aim for number one, right? 

Remember when I wrote about the Cosplay Contest for SWC? After some digging and sitting through a potato-quality video (because I can't seem to find any coverage whatsoever about the Cosplay Contest), I am happy that I can follow up on that article by stating a wee young Scylla with Dad in tow won for the women's portion of the contest, while Hades won for the men's side.