Blizzard Entertainment announce Overwatch Champions Series will be expanded into China..

Blizzard Entertainment announced on its official website on Saturday that starting this year, the Overwatch Champions Series will add a tournament in China.

According to Blizzard's official statement, the China tournament will be hosted by ESL FACE IT Group, the organizer of the FACE IT League Masters, and will be held at the Hangzhou E-sports Center.

With this announcement, China will become the fourth country to have an independent tournament for the Overwatch Champions Series, which also happens to bring another good news for all Chinese players after Blizzard restarts servers across the country on February 19 this year.

At the same time, Blizzard also announced that the 2025 Esports World Cup, which will be held in Saudi Arabia later, will become the second stage of the online competition after the reformat of the Champions Series, and this year's World Championship Finals will be held in Stockholm, Sweden again.

The complete participation details of the Overwatch Champions Series China will be announced in the future.

Blizzard Entertainment announced on its official website that the Overwatch Champions Series will return with a new format on end of November.

The new format will be held in three stages, and the world will also have in three large-scale international live events. The first stage of the competition will be held from the open qualifiers in January, and the next stages will be divided into different regions.

The top 8 to 12 regular season teams in each region, as well as the teams invited for outstanding performance in the regular season of each region, will be selected to participate in the World Finals held at the end of the year.

To add more nail-biting moments to the event, Blizzard also announced that for each stage, two teams born from the promotion/relegation format of each region will be directly advanced to the next stage.

The bottom two teams from the North American, European, Middle Eastern and African regions in the Champions Series will have to compete with the top two teams in the FACE IT League Masters regular season for the remaining two spots.

Teams in the Asian region can win the opportunity to participate in the promotion/relegation tournament by registering for the qualifiers hosted by WARA.GG in Korea, Japan and the Pacific region.