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Pubg Mobile Pro League kick-off

Varun Parashar
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Pubg Mobile Pro League kick-off

PUBG MOBILE has unveiled the all-new tournament PUBG MOBILE Pro League (PMPL) as the pro-level addition to this year’s mobile esports program. Creating suitable stages and additional competing chances for professional players and teams, PMPL 2020 is kicking off in various countries and regions starting from Feb 14.

PUBG MOBILE Pro Leagues will feature selected countries and regions, including Indonesia, Malaysia/Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Chinese Taipei, as well as South Asia and the Americas. The league is divided into Spring and Fall seasons that culminate in the PUBG MOBILE World League (PMWL) in May and October, respectively. Top pro teams standing out from PMPLs will qualify for PMWL and even get their chance to compete for the highest honor in the World Championship in December, as well as a large chunk of the $5 million USD prize pool for the all-year esports program.

The PMPL schedules for different regions include:

  • Southeast Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia/Singapore, Vietnam): Friday, Feb. 14 to Sunday, April 19
  • Chinese Taipei: Thursday, March 12 to Sunday, April 19
  • South Asia: Thursday, March 12 to Sunday, April 5
  • North and South America: Early to late April

The PMPLs offer professional players and teams a tailored platform to compete, starting with the PUBG MOBILE Pro League 2020 in Southeast Asia (PMPL SEA 2020). From Feb 14 onwards, PMPL SEA 2020 will take place in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, representing the largest professional tournament on the country level ever held by PUBG MOBILE in Southeast Asia. PUBG MOBILE fans and community members can follow the action here beginning today.

In 2020, PUBG MOBILE completes the structure of the global esports ecosystem, supporting an amateur-semipro-pro as well as the country-regional-world level for players to start their esports path to stardom. Adding more suitable stages and additional competing chances to players around the world, the tournaments include PMCOs open to all-level players, PMPLs and PMWLs for professional players, as well as the World Championship for the best teams coming out on top to compete for the highest honor and unprecedented total prize pool of $5 million USD.

Stay tuned for more news and updates!

Pokimane donates $50,000 to the University of California Irvine for esports scholarships

Pranav Nalawade
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Pokimane donates $50,000 to the University of California Irvine for esports scholarships

Popular gaming personality Pokimane has donated $50,000 to the University of California, Irvine for student scholarships in its esports program. An initial $25,000 gift this year will be combined with the remaining $25,000 in 2021 to create an endowment that will fund tuition and fees for gamers selected by UCI Esports.

Imane Anys, better known as Pokimane, is a prominent Twitch video game streamer and YouTuber. Currently a resident of Los Angeles, the 23-year-old Moroccan Canadian got her start streaming herself playing “League of Legends” and “Fortnite.” UCI’s esports teams regularly compete in “League of Legends” and were the national champions in 2018.

“I am so pleased to be able to give back to the gaming world, which has given me so much,” Pokimane said. “I love being able to share my experience of how I got to where I am today in hopes that it will help others who are on their way. I’m also especially happy to be supporting UCI’s esports program because their students are focusing on gaming in addition to pursuing their college degrees – which, I can say from experience, isn’t easy!”

This is the first endowment in the history of UCI’s 4-year-old esports program, and it allows the merit-based Pokimane Scholarship to be awarded in perpetuity to deserving students. Beginning in 2022, about $2,500 will be given annually to a single undergraduate. There is no limit to how many times a student can earn the scholarship during his or her time at UCI.

“We couldn’t be more excited about this generous gift from Pokimane,” said Mark Deppe, director of UCI Esports. “The gaming community contributes so much passion and energy to the world of esports, and we are thrilled to recognize and reward some of the outstanding leaders. I am incredibly thankful for Poki’s generosity, and I hope this will inspire other successful gamers and streamers in the future.”

Pokimane has amassed more than 17 million followers across all platforms and has made her channels places where they can come for positive, uplifting time. She has always wanted her streams and content to be about bringing joy to her fans and building a community in which everyone can feel safe to be who they are and find support.

“This is such an exciting experience for the UCI gaming community,” said Shannon Chan, a senior in informatics and president of The Association of Gamers at UCI. “It’s very inspiring and heartwarming to see such a prominent streamer interact so closely with us. Thank you to Pokimane for her generous gift! As a leader in our campus gaming scene, I’ve gotten to know so many passionate gamers who, I’m sure, will be thrilled about this. I’m excited to see how this will support them.”

UCI is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report, has been named the No. 1 college in the country by Money magazine, and is first on Sierra magazine’s list of the nation’s most sustainable “Cool Schools.” UCI also was ranked No. 1 by Forbes for best value among America’s public universities and twice in a row topped The New York Times’ College Access Index of U.S. universities “doing the most for the American dream” for its commitment to upward mobility.

Project A: Riot Games’ Answer To Valve’s CSGO

Prateek Jain
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Project A: Riot Games’ Answer To Valve’s CSGO

Riot Games back at their 10-year anniversary celebration in October 2019 announced Project-A, a character-based tactical FPS shooter game. Riot shared some early footage showing some cool character abilities and precise gunplay. The game looked a lot like a cross between CS:GO and Overwatch. The game also promises to make strides in eliminating cheating incidents and featuring a flawless net code to enhance the player experience.

To date, no new information or leaks were available other than the official teaser by Riot, but this week former CS:GO Pro payer and Commentator Henry Greer aka HenryG got a chance to try out the game. Riot Games invited HenryG to play Project A at their European office. Later, HenryG shared his views about the games and as everyone predicted the game takes elements from both CS:GO and Overwatch.

Similar to CS:GO, the game will be 5on5 round-based where players will need to plant or defend against the bomb, buy weapons and equipment from a resource pool that carries over from round to round. The game also features CS-like maps with chokepoints and lanes.

Similar to Overwatch, each character will have special abilities, but these abilities won’t recharge passively and need to be purchased at the very start of around.

According to Henry, the game’s economy will have a huge impact, with weapons, equipment, and special abilities all sharing the same money pool, the player will be limited to either gear-up fully or partial gear-up with a special ability.

The game is still in the early development cycle and things can still change drastically or just minorly, so it’s better to wait for an open beta and experiencing the game firsthand.

Report: Sony struggling with PS5 price due to costly parts

Prateek Jain
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Report: Sony struggling with PS5 price due to costly parts

Reports suggest that the upcoming PS5 can be Sony’s most expensive PlayStation machine to date costing up to $470 for the basic model.

According to a report by Bloomberg, which spoke with multiple people familiar with Sony’s PlayStation department, the PS5 console cost upwards of $450 to manufacture and Sony is in jeopardy to whether sell the console at loss or make some profits. Some within the company believes in taking a loss if necessary to match Microsoft’s pricing, while others prefer the more profitable approach similar to PlayStation 4 launch.

Generally, Sony finalizes the pricing of new consoles by February, but this time the company is also trying to stay competitive with Microsoft that also plans to launch its new Xbox Series X in Holiday 2020 time.

Bloomberg also noted that the CFO Totoki is also pressuring Sony to provide more transparency and information in the buildup to the PS5’s release, which has caused some consternation internally.

This rise in price is due to a number of factors such as difficulty in securing an appropriate supplier of memory, as well as a more expensive than usual cooling system due to more beefer cooling needed to handle the heat generated from new advanced hardware.

Given the specs of the PS5, the high manufacturing cost is no shocker. As for other factors, the cost of parts might not come down anytime soon as there is a threat of Coronavirus going in China due to which many plants and factories are either not fully operational or closed down.

We will have to wait and see what approach Sony takes as the PS5 release date of Holiday 2020 is still months away.

Ubisoft Announces ‘Prince Of Persia: The Dagger Of Time’

Prateek Jain
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Ubisoft Announces ‘Prince Of Persia: The Dagger Of Time’

Last year, Ubisoft announced Virtual Reality (VR) Escape Rooms, a modern take on traditional Escape Rooms. In 2019, Ubisoft’s BlueByte revealed the first VR Escape Room game called Beyond Medusa’s Gate, a game set in the re-creation of Ancient Greece from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

You may have heard about escape rooms, where a group of people is locked inside a puzzle room where they have to solve a puzzle to leave the room. Similarly, in VR Escape Rooms players will group-up to solve puzzles but inside a virtual world that is built especially for it.

This year, to follow-up on the success of this model Ubisoft, will be taking things up a notch and will release Prince of Persia: The Dagger of Time. The story of the game starts with players being summoned by Kaileena (the Empress of Time), to help her stop the evil plans of a magician who is attempting to restore sands of time to the Hourglass of Time and create an army of sand monsters.

The co-op adventure is based on the classic Prince of Persia video game created by Jordan Mechner in 1989. It is the third location-based VR escape room and part of Ubisoft’s most successful game series (IP). The game is created by Ubisoft’s Düsseldorf and it will debut this spring in more than 300 locations.

Benedikt Grindel, managing director of the German Ubisoft studios in a statement said:

“Controlling time in VR is a one-of-a-kind experience where players will feel the power of the dagger of time in their own hands. Ubisoft has partnered with more than 300 locations around the globe and what started as a pilot project became one of the largest distribution networks in the location-based entertainment market”

Prince of Persia: The Dagger of Time launches in Spring of 2020.

Entity Gaming part ways with Ace

Bharat Kotwani
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Entity Gaming part ways with Ace

With Psy parting ways with the team, Tejas “Rite2ace” Sawant has also been released by the organization, the latter announced today on their Facebook page.

With having joined Entity at the end of November in 2019 replacing Debanjan “DeathMaker” Das, Ace along with his company was unable to perform as the team chemistry didn’t hit the correct gear which saw them suffer a plethora of poor results at the WESG 2019 South Asia Qualifiers where they were knocked out by Bhavin “HellRanger” Kotwani and his men in the do or die stage with previously suffering a loss against BL4ZE led by Agneya “Marzil” Koushik. After the WESG scenario with fire still in their bellies, they did look pumped up for the NVIDIA Geforce Cup Pacific 2019 held at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But odds totally seemed against them as they ended the tournament without a single win in their bag. Since then there had been some undefined acquisitions about the team parting ways with the core but the rumoured air was cleared after we did see the roster compete once again at some Lan tournaments. Before this scenario of Entity parting ways with the majority of its core, we saw them lift ESL INDIA PREMIERSHIP WINTER SEASON after beating BL4ZE Esports with a scoreline of 2-1. In the past week, we did witness Entity part ways with Karan “Excali” Mhaswadkar, Chinmay ‘poki’ Mehta.

Today, With more 2 from ETG’s core departing the starting Five, Entity gaming now has Anuj “Amaterasu” Sharma as the lone man standing on the roster. With the departure of the majority of ETG’s core, the future of this roster is now facing some unforeseeable fate. Earlier in January, the organization was weighing up the possibility of shifting its operations to SEA by shuffling the roster but the team would be re-built around Tejas “Rite2Ace” Sawant who now is looking for new opportunities.

PSY leaves Entity Gaming

Bhavya Shah
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PSY leaves Entity Gaming

Prior to ESL India Premiership 2019 Winter LAN Finale, TalkEsport had reported an overhaul of Entity’s Counter-Strike roster. Surprising its critics, the roster triumphed at the event though roster change was imminent. Karan “Excali” Mhaswadkar and Chinmay “PoKI” Mehta initially departed the roster. Sources suggest that former is likely to close in with U Muma eSports while later reunites with his former 2EZ mates at Phoenix Esports.

Simar “Psy” Sethi has been with Entity Gaming since late 2017 when Entity Gaming acquired Mammoth Gaming’s Counter-Strike roster after ROG Masters 2017 APAC. Prior to this, he was signed by Entity Gaming for its ‘Blue squad’ in September 2016.

With Entity Gaming, Psy triumphed at ESL India Premiership 2017 Winter LAN Finale, Mountain Dew Arena 2018, Taiwan Excellence Gaming Cup 2018, ESL India Premiership 2018 Winter LAN Finale, Mountain Dew Arena 2019 and ESL India Premiership 2019 Winter LAN Finale while represented India at Zowie eXTREMESLAND 2019.

With Psy’s departure, Entity Gaming is down to two – Tejas “Ace” Sawant and Anuj “Amaterasu” Sharma. However, Entity’s future with a SEA based CS:GO project was anticipated earlier, this now remains highly uncertain in the near future.

Coronavirus: ViCi to miss IEM Katowice 2020

Bharat Kotwani
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Coronavirus: ViCi to miss IEM Katowice 2020

Tyloo will replace ViCi gaming at the IEM Katowice 2020 after the events of Coronavirus flaming up the Visa issues for the latter.

Intel Extreme Masters today on their twitter did announce about Team TyLoo who are all set to replace ViCi Gaming at the IEM Katowice 2020 which is scheduled to start from 24th of this month lasting till 1st of the March.

One of the players among ViCi’s starting Five couldn’t get hold of his Visa to Poland due to the ongoing setback caused by the Coronavirus. This setback has put the application process in such a position only to be delayed which did cost ViCi their spot at the IEM Katowice. ViCi had topped the Asian Closed Qualifier when they overcame Tyloo in the same thus booking a ticket to Poland. But odds totally seem to be in favour of Tyloo as they now look forward to compete at the tournament as they have been really pumped up after bootcamping in Ukraine since the start of February.

With this slot swap, we would now see Seon-Ho “xeta” Son make his debut with Tyloo after Hansel “ BnTeT” Ferdinand left the team to join Ex-Cloud9 trio and Sam “s0m” Oh who now play under the banner of Gen.G. Tyloo now joins Liquid, mousesports and Evil Geniuses in the Group B where they would be facing Finn ‘karrigan’ Andersen and his men in their opening match.

New study finds gamers are more likely to pursue Science majors in High School, Colleges

Deepak Ojha
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New study finds gamers are more likely to pursue Science majors in High School, Colleges

Leading esports and gaming sabermetrics platform GYO Score has developed a new study correlating esports athletes and their interested college majors and collegiate preferences.

The report conducted on the GYO Score platform finds astounding results and shows 52.6% of esports athletes at the high school and collegiate levels are interested in pursuing a college major in the “Sciences” category (traditional STEM fields). The category includes computer science, nursing, engineering, applied sciences, etc.

“There has always been this assumption and stereotype by the esports community at large that if you’re into gaming and esports, you’re probably also into computers, science, and math,” said Shawn Smith, CEO of Harena Data and chief architect of the data survey.  “After nearly a year of recruiting players interested in pursuing esports scholarships, our data lays the foundation for these assumptions at an even greater rate than we had expected.”

Additionally, nearly 24.4% of esports athletes are interested in pursuing a college degree in “Arts” or “Business & Finance”. The statistic will surprise many as traditional athletes such as football, basketball, baseball, and hockey have historically pursued these two categories for their college majors in much greater numbers. For comparison, a 2016 Bleacher Report study shows a much higher percentage of college football athletes gravitate towards business and social sciences (55%+) than STEM-related majors, with only 9% of athletes falling into the “Arts and Sciences” category of the study. 

The GYO Score report found that arts (design, graphic design, fashion, acting, and others) account for 13.3% while business & finance (economics, accounting, finance, and others) account for 11.1% of surveyed respondents.

With the rise of gaming, 13.2% of surveyed athletes would be interested in a major related to gaming and esports. Lastly, 5.3% of respondents do not know what they want to pursue and 4.4% have been categorized as “Other”.

The original study findings can be found published here on GYO Score’s blog.

PMCO 2020: India Group Stage concludes; Fnatic finishes on top

Varun Parashar
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PMCO 2020: India Group Stage concludes; Fnatic finishes on top

After 6 days of carnage-filled matches between the top Indian PUBG Mobile squads, the India Group Stage for this year’s PMCO 2020 has finally come to an end. Tomorrow marks the beginning of the Regional Semi-Finals which will last till 18th of February and will make way for the Regional Finals.

Fnatic, a team running short of chicken dinners in the past two days, gave it their all today and managed to bag two chicken dinners securing a total of 81 kills and 206 points. Their fast-paced rush style gameplay seemed to have worked this time as well as they have the highest number of kills compared to any team. Team Orange Rock got done with their matches yesterday and was sitting comfortably at the rank 1 spot but now they trail with a mere difference of 5 points. Commendable performance by their player, Daljitsk who showed impeccable consistency throughout this stage ensuring his name always comes up on the top fraggers list. Team Mayhem sitting at the third spot performed seamlessly securing 74 kills and 4 chicken dinners giving them a total of 184 points.

The top 24 teams from the group stage advance to the semi-finals and will now be divided into 3 further groups and will be playing in the below-given format:

The final overall standings after the conclusion of the group stage has given us the top 24 performers who now move on to the semis and they are as follows:

pos 1-8
pos 9-16
pos 17-24

The top 16 teams from the semi-finals round will move on to the Indian Regional Finals to duke it all out for a massive share of the $1 Million Prize Pool. We congratulate all participating teams for their elevated gameplay and wish all qualifying teams the very best of luck for the remaining 2 rounds. We also thank

You can tune into PUBG Mobile India’s official youtube channel to catch all the semi-final action live.

Stay tuned for more news and updates!

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