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According to eSports professionals at GDC, the best way to make an eSports game is to not make an eSports game – it’s actually more about building strong communities and reacting to the feedback they supply. While ‘don’t build an eSports game’ might not seem like particularly helpful advice, you …
Read More »Lawyer’s perspective: A legal evaluation of Riot’s new competitive penalty policy
European esports lawyersPete LewinandJas PurewalfromPurewal & Partnersbreak down Riot’s new standardised penalties in competitive League of Legends. Last November Riot became the first esports league operator to implementminimum contractual requirementsfor their top teams and players. This week, Riot made another huge play with theannouncementthat it is standardising the penalties for …
Read More »Esports pros on why women’s tournaments are needed, but not forever
"My goal is to get rid of these female tournaments altogether," says Stephanie Harvey, a five-time world champion in Counter-Strike. "The goal is to compete against each other and be one of the first competitive environments that doesn’t care about gender." During a talk at GDC, Harvey and Morgan Romine, …
Read More »Will humans lose out to AI in eSports too?
Robots are taking our jobs. It’s a simple fact about our unstoppable march towards the future that we don’t want to acknowledge, but at some point we’ll all have to accept. First agriculture, then manufacturing, and now games have fallen to our silicon-brained superiors. The latest victim of this assault …
Read More »Meet the 15-year-old Hearthstone pro who’s teaching veterans a thing or two
Andrew "TidesofTime" Biessener, aHearthstone veteran with more than $50,000 in prize money winnings in Hearthstone, is gliding through an early qualification tournament for Blizzard’s $1.6 million Hearthstone Championship Tour. In the semifinals he needs to only beat William "Amnesiac" Barton, a sandy-haired 15-year-old playing in only his fourth tournament. But …
Read More »Diversity and digitally scanned players – Intel on changing the face of eSports
One of competitive gaming’s main players has big plans for the future – but you might not even know it was calling the shots. Intel– that’s the company behind all those CPUs, motherboards and SSDs, right? Yep, but it’s also one of thebiggest names in eSports, and has been for …
Read More »League of Meta – From individual mechanics to high-level strategy
League of Legends is (constantly) changing. Gone are the days of games being decided by a brilliant early game outplay. Gone are the the days of a single player standing so far above the rest so as to single-handedly lay low their teams foes. Once, the barrier between a great …
Read More »Head Games – Injecting sports psychology into esports
In the world of competitive gaming, you can have the sharpest mind, the fastest reflexes and be the greatest player alive in your bedroom—but it’s all for naught if you can’t perform under the spotlights of the big stage with thousands, sometimes millions, watching you. Read more at ESPN >>>
Read More »Over 1,300 new UK stores sold video games in 2015
The number of physical stores selling video games jumped up in 2015. 6,609 stores sold games in the UK last year, a rise of 1,337 over 2014. The data comes via GfK and retail trade body ERA. Every store type increased last year, including electrical chains (up by three stores), …
Read More »Professional Gamers Are Just As Physically Taxed As Athletes, Study Finds
It’s the debate that will seemingly never die: is esports real esports? Should professional gamers be considered athletes, or even semi-athletes considering the amount of hours they have to train, research and prepare? Should video games even be associating the most proficient of its kind with the word sports at …
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