U Sports founder Ronnie Screwvala and co-founder/CEO Supratik Sen today announced the launch of Season One of an ESports League. The best Gamers in India come together for the inaugural season to be in combat across PC, Console and Mobile with three of the most popular Games from around the world, including CS: GO and Dota 2.
The first season will have six teams of 12 players each – and unlike recently launched leagues, U Sports will not sell the teams in the first two seasons.
The League goes Live on MTV as the TV partner and will also go across digital platforms YouTube, Twitch and U Sports’ own digital platform. Commencing in June, it’s live for 36 consecutive days to the finale.
At U Cypher’s first meet with 70 of the top Indian gamers, Ronnie Screwvala and Supratik Sen outlined U Cypher’s vision to exponentially boost the perception of E sports in India. By becoming the first Esports league to be televised in the country, U Sports aims at a paradigm shift to drive a larger section of youth to gaming. Supratik Sen added, “While our goal is to move towards a live broadcast, we believe a packaged show format will help us cut across audiences.’
The teams will be competing in Season 1 for a prize pool of Rs.50 lakhs, split across all teams basis their final ranking in the league. “Our goal is to turn E sports from a hobby into a profession; and thus the Prize Money on offer each season will go up steadily, making it worthwhile for gamers to pursue their passion full-time”, Ronnie Screwvala. E Sports athletes will schedule their time to be a part of U Cypher. Supratik Sen added,’The league will create new identities suited for television and mass viewing preparing the players to become aspirational house hold names in the future.’
U Cypher will provide the much needed platform as a top E sports league in India for gaming. It will also work towards, so as to attract the best global talent into the league in the forthcoming U Cypher seasons. It will create greater excitement amongst the gaming community as it could be the link that will raise the level of E sports in the country. Finally this will be a league that could well make E sports a viable career option, at par with a career of a mainstream athlete.
Farzad Palia, head of youth & English Entertainment channels at Viacom18, said, “MTV has always been the one to set trends and innovate where the youth are concerned and broadcasting UCypher is one more such exciting innovation by us.“
Things will be different this International Women’s Day if you are a gamer, and oddly a woman. Cooler Master has decided to take up the responsibility to look for female gamers in the country. SheChose2Be, a 1v1 gaming championship, will be played on Drag2Death platform starting 4th of March, 2017.
Little different than the regular celebrations on International Women’s Day, Cooler Master has announced an all-together Esports event, SheChose2Be for females. The event will have DotA 2, CS:GO & League of Legends as the competing games. Not sure though how will the organizers deal with Shemales.
With the expectation to collect over 480 registrations, Drag2Death will allow the gamers to connect to register on their website and register for the tournament. Meteor Media will be taking care of the graphical and video affairs throughout the event.
Shagufta ‘Xya’ Iqbal at a gaming convention in Bangalore with famous CSGO personality, Edward. Today, despite the dominant perception that most gamers are men, the ratio of female to male gamers is balanced, mirroring the population at large.
The first, all-female esports tournament is not only limited to India, besides players from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bangladesh are also open to register. The total prize money for the event is approximately Rs. 25,000 which will be paid in goodies.
Winners from all the three games will be awarded the same prize:
1st Prize – Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite
2nd Prize – Cooler Master Devastator II
Although the prize pool is not great, but the sentiment behind hosting an event at such a large geographical scale, presents the positive purpose of it. In India, there are lots of gaming events which are not restricted to males or females, but generally, the turn-up and participation are prevailed to be 100% males.
This time around, however, things are different. Different enough for the females to garner their talent, and an extraordinary chance to form a female pro community of their own. According to an Entertainment Software Association survey, women players in the United States increased from 40% in 2010 to 48% in 2014. And India is far from achieving those metrics at this point in time.
Zowie, which is undoubtedly the favorite esports brand for gamers has announced its six-month collaborated partnership with SoStronk. The two companies very earlier associated indirectly through Zowie Extremesland 2016 India Qualifiers, on which SoStronk took charge of the matches responsibility.
SoStronk, which is one of the top reputed esports brands in India has earlier partnered with and served to the established players in the Esports fraternity, with the likes of ESL, PGL. Very recently, SoStronk’s Sudhen ‘Bleh’ Wahengbam was introduced as a guest by a popular Esports analyst, Thoorin on his channel to discuss various esports possibilities in the Asian region.
Zowie, on the other hand, was one of the most anticipated esports brands to be launched in India the previous year, with this solid partnership, the PC Gaming and Esports happens to have a very good time ahead. The speculations suggest that Zowie and SoStronk will have a mutual vision for the development of the Esports and gaming scene in India. Both the companies will join hands to bring more significant events in India.
Other than the events, and product partnerships, Zowie’s product range will also be available on the SoStronk Marketplace for gamers to purchase using points that they can earn through participating in SoStronk daily events and tournaments.
Rajeev Singh, M.D., BenQ India, said: “This association with SoStronk solidifies our intention of providing viable platforms to talented gamers in India to take up gaming professionally. Zowie products ensure that this progress happens without any compromise on their gaming experience.”
Prashant ‘Aequitas’ Prabhakar, CEO of SoStronk: “I have been a long-time proponent of the Zowie brand, myself having used Zowie mice since they were first launched. As the CEO of SoStronk, I want to partner with organizations who take eSports and competitive gaming as seriously as we do. With Zowie, I feel SoStronk have found the right partner who shares the same vision and goals, and am excited to see what this brings for our users.”
Almost a year ago, Zowie was acquired by BenQ to help construct a mega Esports brand. The product range of Zowie’s mice assisted by BenQ’s marketing and business network steered the company to a great success in the industry. In India, however, Zowie’s products were introduced very recently.
When gamers are affected in masses, Valve still doesn’t seem to appear little bothered. Things will, now, however, change as per a Valve engineer. Other than killing the numbers of hackers through VAC and Overwatch, Valve is developing a ridiculously smart and intelligent anti-cheat system which will run a thorough scan of every match-making played. Although it seems like a big dream, Valve’s official response in a Reddit thread has confirmed about their R&D working on such an interface.
The sense of affection about this development process from Valve concludes two sets of a genre in a generous mind. As said by the Valve engineer, that a good news states that they have already done researching about this system and are now implementing it further to eliminate the biggest threat to the CSGO community of the future. Not ignoring the adverse side of the story that the automatic scanning of demos takes too much time and resources and is right now next to impossible to introduce an innovation which will impact millions.
Valve Anti-Cheat official Reddit account’s response in a post: “So some bad news: any hard-coded detection of spin-botting leads to an arms race with cheat developers – if they can find the edges of the heuristic you’re using to detect the cheat, the problem comes back. Instead, you’d want to take a machine-learning approach, training (and continuously retraining) a classifier that can detect the differences between cheaters and normal/highly-skilled players. The process of parsing, training, and classifying player data places serious demands on hardware, which means you want a machine other than the server doing the work. And because you don’t know ahead of time who might be using this kind of cheat, you’d have to monitor matches as they take place, from all ten players’ perspectives.
There are over a million CS:GO matches played every day, so to avoid falling behind you’d need a system capable of parsing and processing every demo of every match from every player’s perspective, which currently means you’d need a datacenter capable of powering thousands of cpu cores. The good news is that we’ve started this work. An early version of the system has already been deployed and is submitting cases to Overwatch. Since the results have been promising, we’re going to continue this work and expand the system over time.”
The demonstration of the actual system which will be an automatic machine learning lessons on how to differentiate between a genuine and ingenuine kill may take quite some time to come to reality. But satisfyingly the cheat providers seem already terrified by this move. All the major CSGO cheat providers which blatantly chose to ignore Valve and its anti-cheat system, are now alert and have stopped offering cheats until further research from their end of investigation this new VAC system.
The Crimson Web M9 Bayonet will set you back a small fortune Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or CS:GO for short, is the massively popular first-person shooter, developed by Valve Corporation and their partner, Hidden Path Entertainment, which released in 2012.
Development originally started out to be a port of Counter-Strike: Source for Xbox 360 by Hidden Path. Valve, however, saw something else in the port: an opportunity to expand upon its existing Counter-Strike franchise. This led to them turning the project into an entirely new game.
To find out just how popular CS:GO really is, look at the numbers and they speak for themselves. On PC in 2016 so far, the game has averaged nearly 375,000 players per month, with peak numbers normally coming well north of 800,000.
This wasn’t always the case though, with present numbers dwarfing those that occurred around the launch nearly four years ago: just over 16,000 players per month on average in its first year, with peaks barely scratching 50,000. A humongous difference to say the least, it was still living in the shadow of its thirteen year-old predecessor which was boasting double those numbers at the time.
While CS:GO was Valve’s attempt at widening the audience of the Counter-Strike franchise past the PC and onto Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but the bread-and-butter bulk of its players are PC gamers. As such, Valve found itself with a bit of a challenge on it’s hands.
Glock-18: Fade – Only a few hundred dollars worth of skin
Long before CS:GO, the previous titles in the franchise, CS 1.6 and CS:Source, were very popular, each boasting active communities in their own rights. The task that lay ahead was clear: combine the communities of both games into one title. It sounds straightforward, but when both communities considered themselves worlds away from their Counter-Strike counterparts, Valve and Hidden Path needed to find a way to appease both sides of the current CS universe, while simultaneously making a game that was accessible to those new to the franchise too.
Fresh paint
A year after its release, CS:GO was just starting to catch up on the numbers of its older brethren, but it still had a long way to go to becoming the popular FPS powerhouse it is today. It had to break new ground, and it did so by following in the footsteps of another popular FPS from Valve…
Well, color me crazy.
Team Fortress 2, another from Valve’s stable of FPS titles, served as inspiration in taking CS:GO onward and upwards. Valve introduced weapon drops to CS:GO of a similar ilk as in Team Fortress 2. The result: CS:GO finally began to move ahead of it’s two older rivals.
This was the ultimate turning point for CS:GO. The item economy that this innovation brought to the game exponentially amped up player interest. Without it, it would be hard to envisage what the state of the game would be nowadays. There sure wouldn’t be any of the numerous tournaments, including the big money majors that Valve sponsors, that get broadcast globally.
In game add-on packs for items and weapon customisation aren’t a new addition to the FPS landscape by any means. They exist for other FPS games in a variety of shapes and sizes. Where CS:GO differs in this respect, what sets it apart from other FPS titles, is an aspect others in the genre lack: viewers. Counter-Strike is a series where a death does not mean an instant respawn. You have to wait until the next round to resume your role. What happens when a player is placed in this virtual limbo is they watch the players who are still in the game. Whether watching in first-person or third-person view, if someone is sporting a pimped-out weapon in game, there’s potential that it will shortly be on display for their teammates to see.
Some fantastic fan-made wooden replicas of the most sought after in-game knives
Valve upped the stakes of the skins system further when they offered fans the chance to win special edition skins by tuning in to watch major tournaments, either in-game or through the Twitch streaming service. These special editions, or “Souvenir skins” as they’re dubbed, are among the most sought after skins out there, due to their exclusivity.
The skins also provided players with a unique chance to showboat in the game. Kill a player sporting skins and they drop their fancy weapon. Pick it up for your own use and you’ve taken your own battlefield trophy, and anyone watching the action has witnessed it. Rub salt in the wound and go off to kill that player again with their own weapon, a humiliation of the highest order in the game, even more so than a tea-bagging. Priceless.
Valve went further still when they added an animation to the game that lets a player pore over their weapon, regularly being used to taunt other players, even more so if the weapon was one you’d pinched off someone else’s corpse. Virtual bragging rights at their finest.wood nkife replica
Money talks
When it boils down to it, what this form of weapon customisation brought to CS:GO was an economy all of its own. The skins brought real money into the game. Owning a plethora of them shows other players your level of dedication but also, they’re fashionable. And as with fashion, showing off is the name of the game. Strutting around a map brandishing a sought after skin lets you team mates and opponents know that you are among an elite group who own a sought after item.
The stakes get amped up literally when you delve further into the world of CS:GO skins. Not only did they bring real money into the game, they become worth real money too. Sellers list their skins in the thousands on the Steam community marketplace, third-party marketplaces are popping up all over the place to allow players to sell them outside of Steam and there are even gambling websites out there that let players pit their skins against each other, betting on things from esports events to plain old roulette.
This gambling aspect has played no small part in taking CS:GO to the dizzy heights it scales today. Stake a bet on a match-up and you’re far more likely to watch the action as it unfolds. It’s clear that this gambling spawned from the skins brought to CS:GO is one of the reasons for that boosted popularity and soaring viewer numbers. It adds an extra element of excitement to an already solid game.
This monetisation has also meant the pro-scene for CS:GO has come along in leaps and bounds. All the pro players will be brandishing their shiny skins in game, being seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers who tune in. The pros now also have the opportunity to gain extra income for their team in the form of personalised to stickers to whack on the weapons, which is surprisingly lucrative for them. For the top teams and players, it’s currently a possibility that they can earn more money than the prize pools for some tournaments, all from sticker sales revenues alone.
It’s not just the pro-players who are drawing in viewers either. Popular Twitch streamers can boast thousands of viewers. Go to any stream and sure enough, they’ll be a proud knife owner, running around the map and flipping it around their virtual fingers to show it off to the world.
If you got it, better flaunt it.
If you own a Porsche, you don’t let it sit stagnant in your garage. You take it out and show it off. And as with any coveted car, taking out a Karambit knife with a Damascus Steel skin, for example, will capture attention of any players watching. Players will ask how you got it, ask you to trade it, or even ask you to give it to them for free in many cases. A testament to the virtual bling that CS:GO boasts in its repertoire.
How to come by such a coveted in-game item is another story itself. Buying, trading or winning from gambling or giveaways all offer avenues for players to pursue their dream skin without having to shell out $2.49 for a key to open a specific case.
There are even those who pursue the latter in droves. It’s not uncommon to find unboxing videos on YouTube, or streamers on Twitch opening hundreds of boxes consecutively in the hunt for firearm finery and millions of people will tune in to watch, itching to see if they unveil something rare, which has a chance of approximately 0.8% of actually happening. It doesn’t stop at in-game bling either. Real-life replicas of the in-game weapon skins pop-up for sale all over the web, significantly cheaper than their virtual counterparts.knife1
This story of money spinning is a kind of rags-to-riches tale. What started out as a console port of a videogame is now one of the most popular FPS games of the current age. Tournaments with massive prize pools are regular fixtures on the CS:GO calendar. Players and streamers can become celebrities in the community. And rare weapon skins can be valued around the same price as a short-haul flight in first-class with all the trimmings.knife3
CS:GO hasn’t been without controversy though. With real money on the line, just as with real-life, there are people who want to part you from it by any means they can. There’s many ways in which people have been scammed for their treasures. Allegations of match-fixing incidents have resulted in bans for some top pro players. In-game cheaters are also rife, with Valve swinging the banhammer on many thousands of players, and surprisingly many who play at pro-levels who been exposed as such.knife5
The skins are also divisive in the Counter-Strike community. There are also those players who simply don’t care about them and some who feel they are not needed. But even those players have to concede that the popularity of the game has proven beneficial too.
The massive player-base for the game has prompted Valve to continually make improvements to the game and iron out kinks with things like maps and weapon balance, even animations. It’s an almost weekly occurrence for a CS:GO player to be receiving the latest updates to their game through Steam. Valve knows that with great popularity comes great responsibility, and they sure don’t shun it.
They even nurture the esports aspect by putting up major money in prize pools for tournament throughout the year, probably knowing that they’ll make it all back through community marketplace sales alone.knife8
As the popularity of Counter-Strike:Global Offensive has grown exponentially since the introduction of skins, and continues to do so, one thing is for sure, Counter-Strike is bigger than ever, better than ever and looks set to stay. Now, I’ve got to. There’s a bomb that needs defusing at A on Dust 2.
Steam client alerted it users in major parts about the recent amendments it made for taxes it implies during the purchase made.
The minor change has principally affected ten countries as of now, and more to be altered later in the year according to steam. As the course of the tax jurisdictions, Steam has informed its users from Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, South Africa, India, Serbia, Taiwan and Australia over the changes to be made during the purchase of any goods or services through steam.
The new changes will be implied in the coming months. Through March, the purchase policy of Steam for users from these countries will be affected till July.
Purchase taxes applicable on Steam purchases as per different countries
The first list of countries which faces the new taxation procedure in the month of March are:
Switzerland – 8%
South Korea – 10%
Japan – 8%
New Zealand – 15%
Iceland – 24%
South Africa – 14$
India – 15%
The next set of countries which follows the tax policy amendment in the month of April, May, and July, are Serbia, Taiwan, and Australia, respectively.
The calculations, however, will be utmost done on the backend and customers will be displayed the maximum retail price of the product after addition of taxes. Steam will make sure it markets the final price of the product at the storefront so as to not create any confusions in the mind of customers of further tax calculations.
The Sales Tax, VAT or GST will be bifurcated at the bill desk before the payment is being made. Putting it in a perspective, if you come across the game, Counter Strike: Global Offensive being marketed at Rs. 575, it will be the final price you pay for the product. The taxation part will be later separated in the invoice prepared by Steam which will show, Product Price as Rs. 500 + further Rs. 75 taxes, adding it to the final retail price of Rs. 575.
Steam also informs that they’ve further planned to add more countries to the list of taxable countries, citizens of whose chose to order through the platform in the current financial year. The thorough details of the taxation with the date of implementation and the rates applied is mentioned on the Steam documentation of payment information.
Good deeds don’t guarantee you long lives. A popular streamer from The United States passed away after attempting to stream for uninterrupted 24 hours. The streamer which goes by the name PosyBird was reportedly raising funds for Make a Wish Foundation.
After completing 22 hours of his 24-hour-long stream planned for charity purposes, Brian ‘PosyBird’ Vigneault from Virginia Beach, Virginia, U.S., reportedly disappeared from his stream and never returned, moderators informed. Assuring the calamity to general public information, Nighbot has a sticky message on his chatbox which reads:
“Known info so far: Around 3:30AM CST Posgy said he was going for smokes and left the stream running, He never returned. around 11 AM CST we were all still here assuming he had fallen asleep. around 19:00 Sorelor sees him online in discord and messages him. The person who responded identified himself as a detective and asked Sore to call him. Sore spoke with him, Called the Virginia Beach police department to confirm the detective’s identity. The detective confirmed Brian had passed.”
Although we are yet to get a response from Twitter on this unforeseen situation, it is very common practice followed by famous streamers across the world of staying up for close to 2 to 4 days to respond to the Streaming Marathon Challenge. In the case of Brian, however, things turned out to be pretty sad and depressing. The loss of life of this young streamer was made public by Brian’s clan “FAME” on facebook where they left a message for the thirty-five-year-old streamer.
“Sad news from Virginia beach , one of the most famous NA streamers and a member of our clan Poshybrid has passed away at the age of 35 , we just can not find words to describe how sad is this moment for all of us and for sure this game will not be the same without the legend.Maybe the saddest lines can not really be written , and the saddest thoughts can not really be uttered , let’s all hope that he is in a better place right now and may his soul Rest in Peace , he will never be forgotten … a person who stays in our hears never dies…”
Nazara Technologies Pvt. Ltd., the parent company to Nazara Games recently announced their interest in the Indian Esports community. Nazara group plans to invest a remarkable ₹136 crores in developing the ecosystem, which is worldwide evident. The company plans to invest $20 million USD over the period of next five years.
The new business which will be formed to operate as the Esports division will be 100% owned by Naraza Technologies Pvt. Ltd., which also reported a active business with revenue of over Rs. 220 crores in the past four years.
Nitish Mittersian, Founder & MD, Nazara Games expressed his positivity towards the newly developed game, he quoted: “Esports has become a cultural phenomenon in the last few years. Countries in Europe, Korea, China, and US have seen massive growth in the number of players and spectators. Asia-Pacific accounts for 44% of the audience and is the fastest growing region globally. Given, improving internet connectivity in India today, launching an eSports league seemed the perfect way to reach out to the large group of eSports enthusiasts in India.”
Picture credits: NDTV / Gadgets 360
While, the CEO of Nazara Games, Manish Agarwal said: “We are excited to provide Indian eSports enthusiasts with a stable and player/community orientated eSports ecosystem, in which players can thrive, improve their skills and become top competitors at an international level. The eSports league will not only be ideal for Indian players but also for fans. This platform will provide very extensive and exciting coverage of the Indian eSports landscape and will allow fans to track the careers and professional achievements of their eSport idols on a daily basis. Based and styled on successful eSports formats that have been applied internationally, Nazara is investing in building a wider eSports ecosystem and will be the first project of its genre and scale in India.”
Manish further added: “Focusing on content, it will work around three major pillars; an online content platform dedicated to the eSports community; a professional league; and a network of pro-teams entirely supported by the company. The league will provide Indian eSports fans with live WebTV content, guides, forums, online tournaments and of course, extensive and professional coverage of the eSports scene.” The league will have 2 seasons per year and will feature 6 teams that will be selected through open and free online qualifier tournaments.
Nazara Games will create another platform to collaborate all the sectors of the Esports industry, from professional teams to community-driven forums, guides, and competitions, Nazare Games aims to create a digital media content oriented platform. The league will feature DotA2 & CSGO currently, while Overwatch and other competitive games stand a chance shortly.
There will not be any pre-approved system, all the professional teams are welcome to join the qualification process by following a standard registration program after the website launches. The possibility of the events and tournaments been broadcasted live through Nazara networks also stands a chance.
The dust has finally settled at the Swedish Counter Strike after weeks of speculations over the anticipated shuffle between Godsent and Fnatic. Both the Swedish organization entered into an agreement earlier when they traded in a similar and consented manner.
JW, Flusha and Krimz left fnatic in the year 2016, following “rising contradictions” within the organization. Krimz, however, was the first one to return home replacing Lekr0. The shuffle which occurred on 15th of August, 2016, didn’t bring great results for both the organization. Fans, professionals and everybody else were playing the same rhythm after the disband was officially made public on Twitter.
Fnatic’s cArn earlier denied any roster change according to a report by SlingShot Esports, but today made an official statement:
Today we are announcing the return of JW and Flusha, who will reunite with Dennis, Krimz and Olofmeister with immediate effect. Needless to say, the aftermath of the team’s split in August came with many challenges and although we have shown great promise of late, we are confident that the revival of our old line-up will accelerate our journey towards once again being the best Counter-Strike franchise in the World.
Speaking about challenges, we have just entered the most competitive year of esports and we appreciate that it’s not only about tackling our rivals in-game, but also about maintaining harmony within our group. I believe I speak for all our players when I say that the past months have been a time of many learnings, and the opportunity we once again get will not be taken for granted. I would like to use this moment to thank twist and disco doplan for their awesome contributions to our team and organisation, and I wish them and Godsent the best of luck in the future!
Godsent’s pronax, who also was one of the fnatic’s and their IGL, had to say:
We are extremely excited about today’s swap and have looked forward to presenting the new line-up including Joakim “disco doplan” Gidetun and Simon “twist” Eliasson. We’re building a new, energetic and hungry team and both players are perfect fits for us and the way we want to play. Our ambition is to grow as a team and to play a major role in all tournaments, we take part in, and we feel that the new combination is a major step in this direction. We wish JW and flusha all the best and thank Fnatic for making this work out. We look forward to the future clashes between the two teams.
This will definitely a homecoming for both the players as fnatic’s era and legendary run with their these five were addressed to be one of the greatest and most successful lineups of all time.
Fnatic now has: Olofmeister, dennis, Krimz, Flusha and JW
Godsent now has: Lekr0, pronax, twist, disco doplan, znajder
Fnatic’s frontrunner and CSGO legend Olofmeister expressed his views on Virtus.Pro’s byali, saying he is the best player in the world right now.
After ELEAGUE Major 2017, where fnatic only managed to get into the semi-finals following their defeat versus Astralis. The Swedish organization looked disappointed with the results, as since they are undergoing roster changes, nothing as of yet compatibly suits the – once best team in the world.
For me Snax is the best player in the world right now
Ever since Olof had wrist injury back in the previous year, Fnatic couldn’t rise back to their optimum level. To make things worse, fnatic’s core also moved to GODSENT following a team shuffle between the two of Swedish organization.
The appreciation comes in after Virtus.Pro almost defeated Astralis in both the maps they lost, with holding the highest number of clutch rounds cutting in his team’s favor, Snax was considerably the best player in the world according to Olof.
Snax had 262 kills, compared to his 186 deaths. K/D ratio of over 1.20. Snax had a total of eight clutches in the ELEAGUE Major 2017. HLTV.org named Snax as the 5th best player in the world behind, FalleN, Coldzera, device and S1mple.
