Hi-Rez Announces Shift To Fully-Online Smite World Championship

This news may sound a bit familiar -- like we'd heard it already -- but just take that as 2020 being what it is. Hi-Rez Studios announced earlier today that it will be shifting the entirety of the Smite World Championships, including placements and main bracket, to a socially-distanced online event. As I said, this might sound familiar and that would be due to the fact that the company made a similar decision back in September regarding the Hi-Rez Expo. However, at the time, they still intended to host the championship LAN event live from the studio.

But, as we all know, the COVID situation hasn't exactly improved. So, after evaluating the situation in the state of Georgia, the company has decided to suspend LAN operations and shift all matches to an online structure so that only a team of production staff will be in the studio.

As the announcement notes, Georgia ranks #7 in COVID cases in the US with around 5,200 new cases being reported every day. So, rather than risk increasing that tally, everything's remote now.