eSports comes to mobile with Sony, MLG partnership

Major League Gaming, Sony Mobile Communications, and Gameloft have partnered to create and launch what they claim is the first-ever competitive smartphone games platform. Extending competitive games beyond console and PC to mobile could help increase eSports' popularity. It's already been a fast-growing segment recently, as evidenced by competitive game league MLG attracting bigger audiences for its tournaments every year, picking up millions in investments, and securing major partners to stream its events. Sony's Xperia Mobile Gaming Arena platform allows players around the world to compete for prizes, as well as check their scores and rankings for participating games -- which so far only includes Gameloft's mobile first-person shooter Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation. The new smartphone game platform bears the name of Sony's line of games-focused, PlayStation-certified smartphones, but it allows users to compete on "all mobile platforms," including iOS and other Android devices. The Xperia Play version of Modern Combat 3, however, has enhancements, such as support for physical controls. MLG's community plays more than 750,000 matches online on PCs and consoles each month, and the league also hosts Pro Circuit tournaments in various cities around the country -- those events are streamed live to hundreds of thousands of viewers across over 170 countries.