Hi-Rez Studios are proud to announce the immediate official release for the long awaited free-to-play MOBA game, SMITE. A recent press release highlighted the history of a game that originally began as an additional game mode to Global Agenda, but quickly snowballed into a ground-breaking concept that deserved a little more attention than just a few regular updates and tweaks.
SMITE began its closed beta journey on May 31st of 2012 before entering open beta in January of 2013. 14 months and a huge amount of updates later, SMITE has finally entered its official launch phase. To celebrate the launch Hi-Rez Studios have released a new cinematic trailer and confirmed the full $200,000 prize pool for the upcoming Launch Tournament which is scheduled to begin this Friday, March 28th. Half of the total prize pool was raised via community contributions, more specifically the purchasing of exclusive in-game merchandise including the Poolseidon skin.
The developers also summarized the open beta testing phase with an exciting infographic which can be viewed in full here. Players accumulated over 74 million hours of gameplay, killed 13.5 billion defenseless minions and waited a combined 1000 man years to respawn – most of which we’re certain included sending constructive messages to team mates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzjKW1kOucM
Source: Press Release