Virgin Gaming launching subscription e-sports service

A new subscription service has been unveiled by e-sports brand Virgin Gaming.

VentureBeat reports that Virgin Premium will cost $4.99 per month. For that users can enter competitive multiplayer tournaments without the need to surrender a portion of their winnings, as is the way with the current offer.

Subscribers are guaranteed entry into at least 33 leaderboards per month, with the top 200 players on each receiving a prize.

This takes away the small pain of giving up a share of the proceeds every time a players plays a match,” executive vice president Wim Stocks said. That fee was discouraging people from playing more tournaments. This made a lot of sense. We expect broad participation among all skill levels.”

Virgin Gaming says it has 2.7m registered players across Xbox 360 and PS3. An average user is aged 24 and play around 13 hours a week. 98 per cent are male and between them they have won $41m in prizes from 80,000 different tournaments.