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Riot Games made an entire slew of announcements over the past 24 hours or so, the biggest of which is the confirmation that the LCS will be moving to a new schedule. There will now be Monday night games. Worlds qualifiers through NA will also change — there will no longer be a regional qualifier tournament as all teams will now qualify through the reworked playoff system. Full announcement can be found here. You can also find an interview with LCS commissioner Chris Greeley with ESPN Esports here.
For the gaming industry, the biggest platform for conversation is most certainly Twitter. Well apparently there were 1.2 billion gaming related tweets in 2019. In a blog post, Twitter broke down the most talked about games, esports, teams and personalities.
What is the biggest gaming company that you’ve never heard of? Loaded is a talent agency, and it represents some of the biggest streamers in the world: Ninja, CouRage, TimTheTatman, Shroud and DrLupo. The list goes on and on. What are they doing for their clients? Just controlling the vast majority of the streaming wars. Full story with Mitch Reames with The Verge.
ESL and Dreamhack made some big moves. They are the new homes for Starcraft II and Warcraft III esports for the next three years. Some of the most storied esports that have seen their popularity dwindle are hopefully in for big resurgences as part of the ESL Pro Tour.
Blizzard also announced that Hearthstone esports have been lent out to ESL and Dreamhack for the next year. The Hearthstone Masters Tour will now take place at ESL/Dreamhack events.