Is this even possible? Extraction esports? We will find out soon.
Delta Force is betting it can turn extraction shooters into a genuine competitive scene. Developer Team Jade and Tencent's TiMi Studio Group have revealed the Delta Force RISE Series, a new esports circuit built around the game's Operations mode, alongside a Global Partner Team Program stacked with established names. The competitive action begins July 10 with the Americas and EMEA Season 1, and the lineup of signed organisations reads like a who's who of modern esports. After nearly two years on the market, Delta Force remains one of the world's most-played free-to-play shooters, and this is its most ambitious attempt yet to convert that popularity into a structured extraction circuit.
The Partner Teams
The fifteen organisations signed to the Global Partner Team Program span North America, Europe, and beyond: The Alliance, Aurora, Evil Geniuses, FaZe Clan, FLC, Fluxo W7M, Gen.G, Gotaga, Leviatán, Nadeshot, NTMR, Spacestation, SPF, Team Liquid, and WLGaming. That's a genuinely heavyweight collection of brands, several of them tier-one names with deep histories across Counter-Strike, Valorant, and other major titles. Their involvement is underpinned by real money, with the Partner Team Program framed as a landmark investment carrying a $1 million total prize pool distributed across two seasons of regional competition. For a young scene with modest viewership, securing that calibre of org almost certainly required substantial financial incentives, which speaks to how seriously Tencent is treating this push.
How the RISE Series Actually Works
The structure is more concrete than the announcement alone suggested. The EMEA Season 1 leg, run in partnership with tournament organiser StarLadder, takes place from July 10 to August 9 as an A-Tier event featuring 12 teams competing for a $230,000 prize pool, with the Americas running its own parallel season. Crucially, this is built around Operations, Delta Force's extraction mode, where squads drop in, gather loot and intel, and try to escape alive. The competitive format leans into that identity, with one notable wrinkle being a win condition tied to decoding objectives called Mandelbricks, the first team to decode two of them closes out a match lobby. There's also a bounty layer rewarding aggression, with teams earning an extra $50 for every kill during the regular season, drawn from a dedicated $75,000 pool, a design choice meant to discourage the passive, avoid-everyone playstyle extraction modes often encourage.
Why This Is a Distinct Bet
It's worth being clear about what RISE is and isn't, because Delta Force already runs a separate and larger competitive scene. The game's flagship Warfare mode just held its world championship, the Delta Force Invitational: Warfare 2026, from June 17 to 21 at the Wuhan Hongshan Gymnasium in China, an S-Tier event with over $440,000 in prize money and 20-player teams. RISE is a deliberate, additional investment specifically in the extraction side, which is a far less proven esports format. Extraction esports has long been dominated, loosely, by Escape from Tarkov, and even there the scene has typically run on smaller, grassroots events with modest prize pools. Delta Force is attempting something different, arriving top-down with publisher backing, big-name orgs, and prize money that already rivals or exceeds anything the genre has sustained organically.
Whether extraction gameplay, which can be slow and unpredictable to spectate, can hold a broad audience remains the open question. But Tencent clearly has the resources to fund the experiment for a good while, and with this many established organisations now committed, the RISE Series gives extraction esports its most serious structural backing to date.
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