Astralis, best known for their Danish lineup in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has entered Fortnite by signing Th0masHD, a local Danish professional player.
While they’ve lately taken attempts to expand into North America, including entering the U.S. stock market and acquiring the NA Rainbow Six Siege team Disrupt, this shows that they’re still devoted to their home market, where they recently announced their own esports facility in Copenhagen.
In the Fortnite Champion Series (FNCS) Grand Royale this weekend, Astralis’ first-ever Fortnite pro will make his debut in his blue-and-red shirt. The entire prize pool for the event is $5 million.
While Th0masHD is a well-known Fortnite player with around 215k Twitter followers, he’s only had little success in the game so far. His biggest performance to date was winning a European qualification for the FNCS Grand Royale in November 2021, alongside Aleksa ‘Queasy’ Cvetkovic and Guild player Anas ‘Anas’ El-Abd.
The well-known Danish organization now competes in five different esports titles, including CS:GO, the European League of Legends championship LEC, Rainbow Six Siege, FIFA football, and, of course, Fortnite.
“For Astralis, it’s about the fact that the game has now proven resilience and development that puts it on level with, if not better than, many conventional esports genres,” said Jakob Lund Kristensen, co-founder of Astralis.
“We want to be in games that have a lot of followers and where we can offer as much as we can in terms of digital and physical actions.” That’s why Th0masHD is the ideal fit for us: he’s a household brand, he’s tremendously skilled, and his games and persona reach a global audience of gamers and fans.”
