Las Cruces, NM (January 2025) - Thank you to everyone who has shown interest in the NM State Esports Invitational thus far. We are excited to bring this tournament back and we already have a great amount of schools registered and ready to compete this March! Without the amazing Esports Community in New Mexico, we wouldn’t be able to achieve this!

Tournament Title Change - We will be making a title change for this year's tournament. We will be replacing Madden NFL25 with NBA 2K25 on the PS5. With this being said we are asking all NBA 2K tournament entrants to bring their own PS5 controller and headset for their matches. The rules will be similar to those in the PlayVS ruleset so please keep them in mind as we send out official tournament rulesets later this month.

Registration and Deadlines - Registration is now LIVE for the 2025 NMSU Esports Invitational! Most universities and high schools have been notified about the registration via Discord and NMSU Staff is looking to complete an email notification for new schools interested in the event. As mentioned on the registration page, there is a $25 Entry Fee per School. You can find the registration link here and the direct payment link here. We have also launched a new page on our website that will centralize our other signup links including Vendor Registration, Volunteer Registration, and Sponsor Registration.

Tournament Entry Requirements - One great question we had arise within our community was the restrictions for students and titles they are allowed to compete on. With this, we would like to announce that our tournament, is in fact, open to Middle schoolers at schools who have supported Esports Programs. Although we allow Middle Schools to register, the titles we are hosting tournaments on will be age-gated based on the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) Rating scale. The ESRB ratings on the games being played at the 2025 NM State Esports Invitational are the following:

E for Everyone: All Ages

E10+: Everyone Ages 10 and up

T: 13 Years or Older

Being that the age requirement for League of Legends, VALORANT, and Overwatch 2 is T for Teen (+13), we will not be allowing Middle Schools to register for these two tournaments. 

Update on Accommodations - Unfortunately, NM State Esports will not be able to provide free accommodations for teams attending the Esports event. Previously, we were able to provide a free hotel room and meal passes for attending schools and their players but, we will not be able to provide this for our tournament in March. With that being said, we will be working diligently to get fixed/discounted rates for hotel rooms and hopefully a variety of Food Vendors that we are looking to have stationed outside of Corbett Center Student Union. More updates on this will be provided to coaches via our Coaches Meeting being planned out via Email in the coming weeks.

Closing Statements - Thank you for all your support on these update blogs, and we appreciate every single coach’s hard work in getting your teams to compete in our tournament! If you have any questions please leave them in the NMSU Esports Invitational Discord Server found here.