With thousands of registered members and hundreds of teams, MKCentral hosts many of the world’s largest online Mario Kart tournaments, with events taking place nearly every week. In order to maximize participation, the majority of our tournaments are currently free to enter. However, we still like to provide prizes for some of our events. While not all events have prizes, we’re open to working with you if you want to support the community and sponsor prizes, either as an individual or as an organization. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, you should read this article before anything else.
Overview of Sponsoring Tournaments
If you’d like to sponsor a tournament, we really value your willingness to contribute! The key to sponsoring a tournament is to talk to a Site Administrator first, usually through Discord. That way, we can discuss details such as what the tournament format would be, what the prize pool breakdown would be, and any administrative fees we may require. Below, you’ll find more information on these points.
Tournament Formats & Prize Pool Breakdown
Generally speaking, tournaments on MKCentral are divided into two categories: team tournaments, and free-for-alls. Team tournaments are events in which teams choose 6 players out of a roster of at least 9 players (often many more), and play matches against other teams, usually varying their lineup each match. Free-for-alls are usually single day events for individual players, or ‘squads’ of 2, 3, or 4 players, with players having the same partners throughout the event. In a free-for-all event, prizes would be given out to the top placing players. Such prizes could be quite large, or even as small as $10, depending on what funds you wish to provide. Team events require much more money to fund, since they involve paying out all members of the winning team(s).
The first step in sponsoring any sort of tournament is to contact us so we can work out a plan. Depending on circumstances, you may sponsor an already-announced tournament, or work together with us to set up a tournament in the future that works with our schedule. Of course, we’re willing to work with you to discuss what kind of tournament you’d prefer. We generally prefer sponsoring free-for-all tournaments in most cases (as opposed to team events), as team events have many complications due to their nature.
For free-for-alls, prize pools would have the top players winning the biggest prize and zero or more secondary players or squads winning a lesser prize. Generally, we like to make sure that all winning players receive at least $10 USD. For team tournaments, talk to us first about your ideas before anything else, so we can arrange to setup a prize pool. Note that we reserve the right to reject any offer to sponsor a tournament, if we don’t think things will work out. However, we’re usually open to working with you!
How to Provide Funding
Usually, we accept funding for the prizes through PayPal, and we can arrange for you to send the money after talking to you about organizing and setting up the tournaments. Since we will handle the payouts in the general case, we charge an administrative fee to cover costs.
The administrative fee for free-for-all tournaments is 10% of the total prize pool, plus $5 USD per player that will receive a prize. For example, in a 4v4 free-for-all where the top squad of 4 players receive $25 each, the administrative fees would amount to $30 ($25 x 4 x 10% + 4 x $5). In this example, we’d expect a $130 payment to cover $100 in prizes. These fees are used to cover fixed costs in sending money internationally, plus exchange rate fees in receiving and sending money. The excess fees will remain in MKCentral’s account balance to cover any future costs (such as server costs, software licenses, more tournament prizes, or other site related costs). The administrative fee for team tournaments will be handled on a case-by-case basis.
If you represent a reputable organization looking to sponsor a tournament, we may allow you to handle payouts yourself, given our trust in your organization. In this case, we will waive any fees; however, we may alternatively work out a sponsorship deal if you’re looking to promote your brand (such as by placing brand naming, logos, or ads on our website or Twitch streams, or through social media streams). In this case, contact us to arrange a deal. We value your support!
Closing Remarks
We value all of our members that support our site. If you don’t want to sponsor a tournament, there are many more ways to help support us. With a small donation through our Site Supporter program (which gives you some nice perks on the site), making a general donation, subscribing to or cheering on our Twitch Channel, or even just using our site, sharing the site with friends, watching our streams, following us on social media, or playing in our tournaments, you are helping us out! With this support, we are able to grow our community and provide bigger and better tournaments for the world to enjoy. For all our supporters out there, thank you!