Challonge joins the XSplit family!

Today marks an incredibly exciting day for Challonge. After nearly 8 years and millions of generated brackets, I’m proud to announce that we’ve found a new home. SplitmediaLabs, creator of the renowned XSplit video streaming products, has acquired Challonge. And we’re not alone! SplitmediaLabs (SML) has also acquired Player.me, the social discovery platform for the gaming community.

While you imagine the implications, I’ll first mention that the Challonge community is immensely important to me. If this deal meant compromising the interests of our members, I would have walked away in a heartbeat. With this in mind, SML is committed to ongoing support of Challonge as a standalone platform, and the site will remain free to use. I’ll be joining the SML team as we accelerate the development of the tournament platform and build powerful new integrations between our products.

But back to the grander vision — Challonge dreams big. Beyond tournaments lie vast possibilities for connecting streamers, tournament organizers, players, and spectators, and discovery is at the core of it all. What do I mean by discovery? Try attracting viewers as a streamer or players as a tournament organizer. Try finding an event to participate in or a new live stream that you’re likely to enjoy. Discovery is increasingly difficult, and tournaments are just one piece of the puzzle. Fortunately, SML and Player.me share the vision of an innovative, connected community of gamers.

Our passionate teams are combining video content creation, a social network for gamers, and a widely used tournament platform — we’re committed to building something that you’ll love, and we’ll have plenty of checkpoints along the way to stay on track.

What should you expect next?

First up, you’ll see Player.me and Challonge enhancing each other with tournament discovery features and more in-depth player profiles.

Thank you for trusting Challonge with your tournaments and for supporting us along the way! Without your encouragement, we’d be nothing. With the addition of people at SplitmediaLabs and Player.me, you’re in better hands than ever, and we can’t wait to show you what the future holds.

– David Cornelius, Challonge! CEO


View the SplitmediaLabs, Ltd. Press Release here
View Player.me's announcement

Introducing our Reflex Bracket Engine

Last month, we quietly launched new brackets on Challonge that are powered by our brand new Reflex Bracket Engine. Given that we tried to keep the look similar to our old brackets, we didn't make a big announcement; however, what happened behind the scenes is a huge deal for us and a major milestone in the redesign of Challonge.com.

So, why the change? Our several year old brackets were inefficient to render and used a lot of old web design approaches that are no longer relevant today. They were holding us back from introducing features we've been dying to release and were forcing us to cap bracket sizes to 256 — even for Challonge Premier customers.

Highlights of our Reflex Bracket Engine

1. Vector graphics based — our brackets can scale to any size without loss in quality. The only limit is your device's pixel density...and your eyesight.
   
   
2. Truly LIVE printer-friendly bracket images. The images we used to offer were generated on the fly and were often several seconds or even minutes out of date. We're now generating SVG images on-demand with the latest data. And highlight #1 means they'll also come out of your printer with beautiful quality. Check one out here: http://challonge.com/capcom_cup_2015.svg
   
   
3. Fast! Our new brackets are incredibly efficient. We can even partially render brackets, rendering only the parts that are visible on your screen. This off-screen culling approach is similar to what you'd see in a video game — no sense rendering scenery that's behind you. With this newfound speed, we'll be re-evaluating our 256 participant cap.
   
   
4. Underpinned by amazing new tech. We're using React.js, a Facebook-managed user interface library, and a new Flux-based architecture to power our new bracket engine. The nontechnical version: we'll be able to offer an immersive new experience for tournament organizers, participants, and spectators. I can't wait to reveal more, but you'll have to wait for our redesign launch!
   
   
5. Extensible. Bracket designs are now limited by design imagination, not by technical constraints. Just look at what we built for Brackets For Good: stlouis.bfg.org. We'll be working on ways to unlock these capabilities to Challonge users.

As we begin to put our new arsenal of technical capabilities to work, 2016 is set to be the most notable leap forward for Challonge. Thank you for continuing to trust us with your tournaments!