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CSGO Pro Is a Global Elite At Valorant Too

Bhavya Shah
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CSGO Pro Is a Global Elite At Valorant Too

Tyson “TenZ” Ngo might have had a bumpy stint with Cloud9’s former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive lineup but the lad is proving his worth in Valorant – Riot Games’ latest 5 vs 5 tactical first-person shooter game. He was a part of Cloud9’s CS:GO lineup for more than three months, though, later benched and finally became a streamer for North-American organization.

Soon after the release of Valorant beta, Cloud9 announced their expansion into Valorant and further revealed TenZ as the first player onboard. Ever since, he has been proving his worth. 18-year-old is the first person to reach the highest rank (Valorant) in Valorant across North-America. He tweeted, “FIRST NA VALORANT RANKED PLAYER.” Hours after his tweet, the official Valorant handle retweeted his tweet and congratulated him.

Ranked matchmaking kicked-off in North-America on May 01 and no one anticipated someone to reach the highest rank this soon. But, he did. For him, the battle ahead might be tough as he will face the best of the best. Valorant has 8 ranks with 3 divisions in 7 of them and the highest rank in Valorant being ‘Valorant’ itself.

UK’s 16 Year Old Fortnite Millionaire Joins Excel Esports

Anuj Rautela
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UK’s 16 Year Old Fortnite Millionaire Joins Excel Esports

Excel Esports has been one of the organizations that is known for having top-performing teams for League of Legends and played a significant role in the inauguration of League of Legends European Championship. On the other side, 16-year old Jaden “Wolfiez” Ashman earned $2.25 million last year for coming second at a Fortnite tournament and has continued his career as a professional Fortnite player since then.

Ashman’s efforts even helped him earn a Guinness World Record as the youngest person in the history of esports to win over $1million USD at a single event. He is the highest esports earner in the UK.

However, this is just the beginning of his professional career. Excel Esports had announced that Ashman’s is joining the esports organization. His signing on is a big deal for the organization as well, as Ashman will be representing Excel Esports in Fortnite in upcoming events & tournaments.

“As an organization, we have been carefully exploring expansion opportunities for a while and when we first met Wolfiez it just seemed like such a natural fit. Everyone at Excel Esports is really excited to work with Ashman to show everyone the best of what British esports has to offer.”

Kieran Holmes-Darby, Co-Founder & Chief Gaming Officer

260 Million Chinese Are Watching Esports Streams

Prateek Jain
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260 Million Chinese Are Watching Esports Streams

As the Chinese economy opens up after weeks of lockdown, the streaming service across the nation witnessed a surge as more than 560 million people, 62% of China’s 904 million internet users participated in live streaming videos, according to a government report released today.

According to the report, “Esports: Live Game” streaming led the chart with 260 million people watching their favorite streamers playing games such as League of Legends, DOTA 2, Call of Duty, and other games from publishers like Tencent, PUBG, Perfect World, Riot Games, and NetEase. This also accounted for a higher than the normal rise in the viewership of these games worldwide.

Whereas traditional sports aka live sports broadcasting holds the second position on the chart with 213 million people tuning in to watch livestreams of sports broadcasting. According to Xinhua, the state-run press agency, Live-host shows accounted for another 207 million, and live concerts of famous singers hit 150 million viewers.

An especially interesting part of the report was the use of the Live-streaming model by e-commerce companies. According to the report, Chinese e-commerce giants like  Alibaba, as well as JD.com, hosted several product streams over their platform Taobao, where famous influencers were called upon to sell products. One such influencer, Li Jiaqi, was able to sell 15,000 tubes of lipstick in just five minutes.

With the population of China and an almost 64% internet penetration, these numbers are unexpectedly good and showcase a higher than normal growth. Given the circumstances of the spread of Coronavirus and the duration of various lockdowns, many people in China moved towards live streaming which also explains the sudden growth.

Going by data from China, a new trend of live streams is on the rise, and in the future, we may see more people and businesses move towards the live-streaming model as it becomes the new normal worldwide.

Author’s Note- The numbers don’t add up perfectly as the report didn’t factor the same user streaming two or more videos at a time. Although the 560 million users record only counts a user once.

PewDiePie signs exclusive streaming deal With YouTube Gaming

Varun Gavankar
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PewDiePie signs exclusive streaming deal With YouTube Gaming

The name PewDiePie itself needs no introduction to many and for the ones who don’t know Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is a Swedish YouTuber, comedian, and philanthropist, known primarily for his Let’s Play videos and comedic formatted shows. He is currently racking up 104 million subscribers on his YouTube channel and his videos have surpassed 25 billion views till date, by far the most any standalone identity has achieved.

The deal comes out after three years YouTube ended its business deals with PewDiePie and almost close to one year after Kjellberg announced that he was streaming exclusively on DLive that is a small blockchain-based live-streaming site.

According to the press release, PewDewPie is excited about going back to his roots.

“YouTube has been my home for over a decade now and live streaming on the platform feels like a natural fit as I continue to look for new ways to create content and interact with fans worldwide,”

“Live streaming is something I’m focusing a lot on in 2020 and beyond, so to be able to partner with YouTube and be at the forefront of new product features is special and exciting for the future,” he said.

Fans of him and YouTube are loving his return to the platform unconditionally, that even his accidental video upload of Call Of Duty he created in 2010 has pulled off 4 million views.

PewDiePie attends the European Premiere of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” at Leicester Square on Dec. 16, 2015 in London. // Karwai Tang/WireImage

The 30-year-old had a memorable year in 2019, incarnating Minecraft series, achieving 100 million milestone and marrying love of his life Marzia.

YouTube’s acquisition of such a big name is a major noticeable move considering they are not the only one within the live-streaming industry – Microsoft’s Mixer, Amazon’s Twitch, and Facebook are already in the market too.

NBA Star Josh Hart rages, destroys keyboard after getting killed in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Anuj Rautela
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NBA Star Josh Hart rages, destroys keyboard after getting killed in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

It’s been almost 2 months since people all around the world are in lockdown, quarantine, or maintaining social distancing amid COVID-19 outbreak. This also means that sports competitions around have the world have either been postponed or canceled. Many famous sports personalities are killing their time by playing video games or online games to have fun.

Sean Gardner/Getty Images

Some are already trying their hands at streaming. Like New Orleans Pelicans Josh Hart who has been streaming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare regularly on his Twitch Channel. We know very well that sometimes the game can be tiring, frustrating, and sometimes a raging experience. And that’s exactly what Josh got a taste of yesterday while streaming.

Josh was playing Modern Warfare with his friends. (one of them being NBA star Zach Lavine) In the game, as he was entering the building, the opponent threw a picture-perfect stun grenade, which then led to Josh’s character’s death by a player dual-wielding .357’s.

Josh then stood up, unplugged his keyboard smoothly, and threw it on the ground. He then stomped it to pieces and when his friend Zach realized what was going on, he burst into laughter. No one is immune to gaming rage, we all have experienced it once or maybe many times. Just make sure you don’t destroy your expensive keyboards like Josh in this video.

BLAST enters Dota 2 with Bounty Hunt tournament

Sonu Banerjee
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BLAST enters Dota 2 with Bounty Hunt tournament

The worldwide lockdown amidst the COVID-19 outbreak is turning out to be a blessing in disguise for Dota 2 fans. Days after Secret’s Puppey announced that he was going to bring back FPL for Dota 2, now it’s tournament organizer giants BLAST who has entered the Dota 2 realm with the announcement of a new tournament planned for Dota 2. They also included a video in their tweet as a teaser to the upcoming tournament.

The Bounty Hunt tournament by BLAST is scheduled to start on 8th June and will feature five days of top quality professional Dota before the finals on June 6.

The tournament will feature a humongous prize pool of $150,000. But even that is not the main attraction of the tournament. What’s really interesting and perhaps revolutionary about this tournament are two things. As mentioned in the official blog post by BLAST, “A dynamic prize pool and a fan prediction game are two big new features in BLAST Bounty Hunt. These features have never been seen before in esports and were created in collaboration with the competing teams.”

Fan predictions

The tournament will feature a never-before-seen fan prediction mode which is expected to attract a lot of Dota 2 enthusiasts. This new mode will have a whopping 5000 dollars up for grabs by the fans watching the tournament by predicting winners of the matches. According to their website, “This new innovation brings the fans even closer to the action, highs and lows and gives the winner cold hard cash.”

Dynamic prize pool

The dynamic prize pool for the tournament means participating teams will be able to earn even further, “A winning team with an unbeaten record could walk away with up to $51,120 plus with additional bounties won, teams can be winning up to $96,000.”

Additional Bounties

In addition to the dynamic prize pool, the tournament is also set to include additional bounties. Additional bounties can be sent by fans through a vote and furthermore, only lucky person voting will have their nickname as a part of the bounty name. This will undoubtedly increase viewers’ interaction with the tournament and “make fans a part of the tournament.”

The tournament is set to feature the teams at the top of the Dota 2 professional scene. The participating teams will consist of OG, Team Secret, Team Liquid, Nigma, NiP and Alliance. The teams will battle it out with over 32 hours of competitive gameplay in BO3s before the BO5 in the championship finals.

Smash Bros: Organizers cut prize money after Pro players smurf in online tournament

Anuj Rautela
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Smash Bros: Organizers cut prize money after Pro players smurf in online tournament

One of the Twitch streamers & pro Smash Bros. player Justin “Plup” McGrath was never indulged in any kind of toxicity, be it in his gameplay or with his Twitch audience. However, his recent actions must have surely put a bad influence of his on the Smash Bros. community.

Brandon Collier, the tournament organizer expressed his disappointment at the fact that he had to deal with players’ smurfing in the Rona Rumble: East Cost tournament; one of them being the Genesis 5 champion.

Not only Plup but other Florida Smashers like Forest and Colbol shared an account to enter netplay tournament, they even tampered the bracket and caused several issues for TO’s and registered players.

Rona Rumble: East Coast tournament had a prize pool of $200 along with player bounties, meaning that any registered player that hasn’t been ranked in the Top 100 could win an additional $50 if they were successful in pulling an upset.

Plup’s antics & performance came out like a storm and passed everyone throughout the bracket, causing more upsets than expected. This forced the tournament organizer Collier to decrease the money earned per bounty to $30.

Since, Plup and the rest were meddling with a community-driven attempt at maintaining a competitive scene amid the COVID-19 pandemic, people in the community were severely upset at the Florida smashers for messing with the only possible way of competing. Rishi, who was among one of the affected entrants, was very vocal about the entire situation. He tweeted the following:

However, Plup apologized to all those who were affected. He tweeted:

Valve builds memorial statues in TF2 to honor Soldier voice actor, Rick May

Prateek Jain
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Valve builds memorial statues in TF2 to honor Soldier voice actor, Rick May

In the latest update of Team Fortress 2, Valve added statues of Soldier around various maps that play one of Soldier’s voice lines randomly whenever a player goes to it. Valve added statues and more to the game to tribute Soldier’s voice actor, Rick May who died last month at age 79.

According to Rekindle School, where Rick taught voiceover acting, Rick suffered a stroke in February 2020 and was moved to a nursing home in Seattle for rehabilitation. On April 8, 2020, it was reported that Rick had died due to complications related to COVID-19 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle.

https://twitter.com/DickInMyJohnson/status/1256341239944736768?s=20

The Statues also have an inscription at the base which show his name with the year of both his birth and death, along with one of the most popular voice line of Soldier “That was a hell of a campaign son!.” In addition to statues, Valve also included a new main menu theme of saluting Soldier character model, accompanied by a rendition of Taps, a song used by the military to honor and mourn fallen soldiers.

Currently, the tribute will last the entirety of May but many players over Reddit believe that Valve will be turning this into an annual tribute in some capacity later on to honor Rick May.

Garena Free Fire Champions Cup (FFCC) 2020 Cancelled

Arundhati Dutta
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Garena Free Fire Champions Cup (FFCC) 2020 Cancelled

The Free Fire Championship Cup scheduled to for 2020 have now been cancelled, Garena announced in a press note.

The situation arose possibly after governments all across the globe are struggling to battle with this global pandemic which has affected millions.

We are disappointed to announce the cancellation of Free Fire Champions Cup (FFCC) 2020, due to the evolving global situation surrounding COVID-19. Our commitment at Garena has always been to priorities the health and well-being of all those involved, including players, fans, partners, and staff. That is what ultimately led us to making this difficult decision.

Our Free Fire esports team has been monitoring the situation very closely and heeded advice from the relevant authorities. This is an unprecedented period for offline and online sports – especially so for international events – and everyone is striving to do their utmost for their communities, and planning around the situation. We would like to assure Survivors that we have explored all possibilities before landing on the decision to cancel FFCC 2020 altogether.

We know many of you were looking forward to FFCC 2020, and so were we. FFCC is a showcase of the very best of Free Fire’s passionate global community; any other variation of the tournament would not meet our commitment to deliver the very best esports experience to our communities.

We are committed to providing our Free Fire community with alternative esports content, and the team has been hard at work with all the preparations. For example, we recently announced the Free Fire India Solos (FFIS) 2020 tournament, held in partnership with Paytm First Games, which will take place in May and June this year. We have also started the Free Fire Scrim Wars and the Free Fire Streamers Battle. We look forward to sharing more exciting updates with you in the coming weeks. We will also channel our energy to ensure future Free Fire’s esports events are filled with all the usual excitement, fervor, and much more – once we get through this difficult phase together.

We thank our Free Fire community for your understanding and continued support, especially during these challenging times. It is worth emphasizing again that the health and well-being of everyone is of utmost priority now. Take care and stay safe, Survivors. We will emerge from this stronger as one Free Fire community.

Esports Athlete’s chair auctioned at $5.9K for charity: Messi, Rooney’s merch together raises $7K

Sonu Banerjee
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Esports Athlete’s chair auctioned at $5.9K for charity: Messi, Rooney’s merch together raises $7K

Jesse “JerAx” Vainikka is a Finnish Dota 2 player who was a part of the TI winning squad of OG. The two time TI winner has recently decided to auction off his gaming chair for charity and the amount it managed to raise has surpassed expectations.

The gaming chair which JerAx had donated to be auctioned off in collaboration with Valavuori Live – A Finnish talk show on Twitch – raised a sum of a whopping $5800. The entirety of the money raised through the auction was donated to charity.

Such a big amount of money raised through an auction of a gaming chair is surely surprising. But what was even more surprising was the fact that Wayne Rooney and Lionel Messi – two renowned stars in the football world (soccer, for you Americans) – also had their signed jerseys auctioned, but at prices which are both individually lower than the price of JerAx’s gaming chair. The final bid for Rooney’s signed jersey was about 4900 dollars while Messi’s signed jersey went for just above $2500.

JerAx played as a position 4 support in his TI winning team consisting of Topson, Ceb, Ana, Notail and himself. He had pulled his team out of several intense and crucial situations in the TI8 finals and maintained consistent performance throughout the time he spent with OG. The impressive display of his skills in the Internationals combined with the fame he earned in his professional Dota 2 career certainly fueled the giant price tag on his gaming chair.

It can be argued that a gaming chair in itself is more pricey than a football jersey, but the price difference is still astonishing to say the least. But then again, add that with the comfortability a gaming chair brings you compared to a jersey and the price might just seem reasonable.

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