In The News
Congratulations to Mark “Ike” Eichner on undefeatedly winning DreamHack Hearthstone Grand Prix and Team Liquid’s Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma on winning DreamHack Denver’s Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament after defeating Cloud9’s Joseph “Mang0” Marquez.
Cloud9 secured $25 million “in Series A financing,” ESPN’s Jacob Wolf reports. “New contributors to the company include the WWE, the Beverly Hills Sports Council, Monumental Sports & Entertainment co-owner Raul Fernandez” and others.
The SNES Classic walloped Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in September. Venture Beat’s Jeff Grubb reports that “September was all about Nintendo’s 16-bit $80 Super NES Classic Edition throwback. ‘Super NES Classic was the overall top unit selling hardware platform in the period.’”
Collegiate esports news:
The NCAA is back in the news. Its board of directors meets this week to discuss collegiate esports, and ESPN’s Bryce Blum gave his take on the matter, writing, “make no mistake — the NCAA, which is meeting Tuesday to continue that conversation, is coming into esports, whether we like it or not.”
What about Title IX? ESPN’s Yifan Wu did a write up of issues schools may face, and how people like University of California-Irvine’s Mark Deppe are working to comply.
So, why Denver? DreamHack’s Michael Van Driel shared their motivations with AListDaily’s H.B. Duran. Here’s a snippet: “‘We want to be in places where we don’t already see big gaming events and where we think there’s a community that can attach itself to us,’ Van Driel said. ‘When we looked around, it seemed like Denver was a good city for that.’”
Destiny 2 (is out today on PC) sits atop the pile of 2017 releases, Engadget’s David Lumb reports. “Just one month after launching on PS4 and Xbox One, Destiny 2 is already the best-selling game of 2017, according to an NPD Group report … Those numbers also make it the third-best-selling game of the last 12 months.”
Wondering what Destiny 2 is like on PC or considering playing Destiny for the first time? The Daily Walkthrough will be streaming tonight on Twitch!
The NeoGAF whirlwind swirls on. NeoGAF reopened last night, Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett reports, and “within minutes users began spamming the forums with topics lambasting” owner Tyler “Evilore” Malka.
Malka was accused of sexual harassment and released a statement saying, in part, “An allegation of sexual misconduct has been made against me by an ex. It’s not true, the individual making the accusation isn’t credible, the story doesn’t reconcile logically with the facts, and there’s plenty of evidence and witnesses to corroborate that. It’ll be a process.”
People won’t always appreciate being put on live video without consenting beforehand, so do ask permission first. Some people at TwitchCon 2017 left with a bad taste in their mouth after IRL streamers reportedly incorporated random attendees into their streams without prior approval.
Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson reports that “‘There were guys shoving cameras in our friends’ faces,’ popular video game streamer LolRenaynay told me during the convention. ‘Our friends were being polite about saying no, and that’s when these guys started getting aggressive.’”
Chill, bruh. Players are fretting over EA’s decision to shutter Visceral Games. This is after former BioWare developer Manveer Heir said “EA (and other big publishers in general, ‘only care about the highest return on investment. They don’t actually care about what the players want, they care about what players will pay for. Those are subtly different things,’” according to Game Debate’s Stuart Thomas.
One former Visceral developer is telling people to talk a walk and calm down, GamesIndustry.biz’s James Batchelor writes. “‘The assertion that single-player linear games are going to disappear is totally absurd,” [Zach Wilson] says. ‘EA might not be the company that carries that torch, but there are so many groups out there that are passionate about this kind of game that they won’t go away.’”
To that point, Game Informer’s Matt Bertz spoke with Rockstar’s Imran Sarwar in a length interview. Sarwar said, “We would love to do more single-player add-ons for games in the future. As a company we love single-player more than anything, and believe in it absolutely – for storytelling and a sense of immersion in a world, multiplayer games don’t rival single-player games.”
It’s a lonely life for B.J. Blazkowicz. He’ll never slay Nazis with a friend because multiplayer would “‘dilute it all,’” according to Tordsson Björk. PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk writes that “MachineGames considers its Wolfenstein games to be action adventures rather than shooters.”
Battle.net seems to have gotten a shoe shine. Sparkly new social improvements include a chat and group tab, personal profiles and avatars, according to Lumb. “Users can now send messages to their offline friends, making the service more of an enduring chat log.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds news:
Evil Geniuses has its own PUBG team. Dot Esports’ Scott Duwe reports that they “picked up PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds team ‘grantJokur.’”
IEM Oakland is all filled up with the final invites going to “Evil Geniuses, Method, and Tempo Storm,” Duwe reports.
Switch on your GameCube controller, they’re compatible with the Nintendo Switch.