Blog Archives
StarCraft ProLeague and Five Top StarCraft Teams Disbanded
The longest active StarCraft competition has come to an end. KeSPA has announced that the StarCraft ProLeague, a Korean team-based league that started in 2003 with Brood War and ran for fourteen years, would discontinue operations effective immediately. This announcement was made simultaneous with the announcement that five top Korean SC2 teams would also disband effective immediately.
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Dota 2’s The International Compendium Purchases Double the Prize Pool in Three Days
Last Thursday, Valve released their official digital program for this year’s Dota 2 world championships, The International. As was the case last year, a 25% portion of the sales of the program, The International Compendium 2014, will go towards funding the prize pool for this year’s International.
After only three days on the market, the prize pool had more than doubled to eclipse The International 3’s prize pool and set a new record for the largest prize pool in eSports history at over $3.4 million and climbing.
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MLG Expanding with X Games Partnership and Chinese eSports Arena
Major League Gaming isn’t taking ESL’s expansion into North America lying down. The first name in American eSports recently announced to major initiatives that show that they’re still focused on growth.
Domestically, MLG has partnered up with ESPN to bring eSports to June’s X Games Austin event. Internationally, MLG will be part of a group building a dedicated eSports arena in China.
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ESL Buys eSports Services, Launches ESL America
First, it was their takeover over the WCS America. Now, ESL is launching their eSports takeover of the whole of the Americas after buying eSports Services (ESS) and launching a new studio in Los Angeles to host ESL’s operations in North America.
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IEM World Championship by the Numbers
With a peak of over 600,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch and over 1,000,000 concurrent viewers when adding in other sources, the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship from Katowice, Poland, was an absolute success. It was the ESL’s most-watched tournament and the most-watched event based in Europe in eSports history with 5.7 million hours more content watched than the previous record holder, the 2013 Dreamhack Winter Championship.
For this and more stats about IEM Katowice, we have a handy infographic for your perusal.
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Free to Play Review: A Long Way to the Top
It’s only fitting that a free-to-play game gets a free documentary to go with it. Valve’s popular free MOBA, Dota 2, now has a quasi-companion documentary called, appropriately, Free to Play. However, it’s not really a Dota documentary and you don’t even need to like video games to like the movie.
While the title Free to Play implies that it’s a documentary about Dota 2 and its development, popularity and the impact its had on gaming, Free to Play is actually about eSports. The documentary follows three competitive Dota players, each with a different background, as they pursue the $1 million grand prize for Dota 2’s The International championship.
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KeSPA Announces Results of League of Legends Matchfixing Scandal Investigation
On Monday, KeSPA, the Korea e-Sports Association which acts as a governing body for eSports in South Korea, released the results of their investigation into the AHQ Korea League of Legends matchfixing scandal that was brought to light by AHQ Promise’s attempted suicide.
The result of the investigation by a KeSPA emergency task force showed that AHQ Korea team manager, Noh Dae Chul, attempted to fix matches at OGN’s League of Legends Champions Spring 2013 tournament but ruled that only Promise had attempted to throw the matches.
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sOs Wins $100,000 IEM World Championship
The old sports cliche of big players make big plays in big games applies to eSports as well. Just five months after being crowned the StarCraft II World Champion at BlizzCon, Korean Protoss player sOs staked his claim to being the closest thing that SC2 has to an undisputed world champion by winning the $100,000 winner-takes-all Intel Extreme Masters World Championship.
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League of Legends Pro Player Attempts Suicide After Revealing Matchfixing Scandal
Former League of Legends pro player Cheon Min-Ki attempted to committed suicide on Wednesday night shortly after revealing that his former team, AHQ Korea, was involved in matchfixing orchestrated by the team’s manager, Noh Dae Chul.
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NASL Shuts Down, ESL Takes Over WCS America Production
The company in charge of production of the Americas region of the StarCraft II World Championship Series announced on Friday that they would be ceasing to produce WCS effective immediately. In a statement on their website, the North American Star League announced that they would no longer producing StarCraft content.
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