London-based esports giants Fnatic have introduced a Vainglory team, as have Echo Fox, NRG, Rogue and Immortals.
The move marks Fnatic’s first move into mobile esports. Its Vainglory roster consists of Dennis “TetnoJJ” Klaus, Alessandro “Palmatoro” Palmarini and Deniz “Nettetoilette” Heinzelmann.
Interestingly, as part of Vainglory’s Home City Program, Fnatic will claim London as its ‘home’. This means Fnatic will help build the Vainglory community by arranging local tournaments, meetups, LAN parties and viewing events.
“For Fnatic, to join the game and pro-circuit of Vainglory can be best expressed as ‘one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,'” Said Patrik Sättermon, Chief Gaming Officer for Fnatic.
“Since the launch of Vainglory, we’ve been closely following its development into a great and mature esports title. We believe there’s a bright future for mobile based esports which signals a shift from the PC-dominated titles until now. Fnatic and its very talented Vainglory roster are looking forward to excite our fans straight out of our main base in London.”
“We believe there’s a bright future for mobile based esports which signals a shift from the PC-dominated titles until now.”
Patrik Sättermon, Fnatic
Each new team will compete in Vainglory’s Spring Season, which kicks off in March, marking the start of Vainglory’s second full esports year.
The full team rosters for the five incoming pro orgs are on the Vainglory website.
These five new Vainglory teams teams join the likes of TSM, Cloud9, G2 Esports, SK Gaming, Team Secret, mousesports and DetonatioN Gaming in the competition, which will culminate in December at the second annual Vainglory World Championship.
To celebrate the arrival of these orgs into the Vainglory esports scene, developer Super Evil Megacorp will be hosting the five teams at its ‘Super Evil Lair’ in San Mateo for a Run the Gauntlet Preseason Invitational on February 26th, which will be broadcast live on twitch.tv/vainglory.
In 2016, Vainglory tripled its active player community on Android, generated more than 450 million minutes of competition watched on streaming platforms and celebrated its first-ever World Championship tournament at the legendary TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, which garnered more than 25,000 concurrent viewers.
After the Vainglory Spring Season in March, there will be the summer season in June and Autumn season in September, culminating with a World Championship in December, followed by the winter offseason.
Further reading: 14-year-old British Vainglory player to appear on the Gadget Show
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.
