A gamer competes at the Seagate-sponsored Rainbow Six Vegas 2 tournament in San Diego.

Top videogame players are battling it out throughout North America this summer for bragging rights and more than $60,000 in cash prizes—and Seagate® is there with enabling technology solutions for this booming storage market.

Major League Gaming's 2008 Pro Circuit Tour brings together dozens of elite gamers, including the Frag Dolls, a Seagate-supported professional team from game developer Ubisoft. The tour includes stops in New Jersey, California, Florida, Texas and Toronto, before culminating in a national championship in Las Vegas later this fall.

Seagate is sponsoring the tour's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 tournament, as well as providing several Maxtor® OneTouch™ 4 Plus external hard drives for a drawing to encourage gamers to try out Ubisoft’s new flight simulator game H.A.W.X.

"We're delighted to partner with Seagate on this major gaming event," said Melanie Desliens, promotions manager at Ubisoft. "Seagate's sponsorship reinforces gamers' positive perception of Seagate products, which provide the storage speed, performance and reliability that gamers demand."

Tour participants also will experience the speed and performance of Seagate hard drives when they sit down to play Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 platforms; both utilize 2.5-inch Seagate LD25 Series™ drives.

The LD25 Series drive, available in 40-GB and 80-GB capacities, is ideal for space-constrained applications like game consoles and DVRs. The drives are engineered to run cooler and require less power than desktop drives, while their special motors deliver "whisper-quiet" operation.

Revenue from the worldwide videogame market, including hardware and software sales, is expected to reach $47 billion in 2009, according to market researcher DFC Intelligence, up from $33 billion in 2006.

"We're taking part in the Pro Circuit Tour to demonstrate to gamers that we're dedicated to this market," said Colleen Rodriguez, Seagate PR program manager. "Gaming represents a huge storage opportunity, and tournaments like this help increase awareness of the benefits that hard drives bring to the gaming experience."

Greater storage capacity enables game developers to deliver more features and downloadable content. Desliens, for example, points out that all major titles from Ubisoft include downloadable content, which "helps prolong the life of videogames and nourishes the hunger of consumers between major game sequels."