MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
The past few months have seen a meaningful surge in coverage surrounding the betting side of the esports industry, and it hasn’t been pretty. Back in April, Bloomberg published a significant investigative piece detailing the scope of the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skin betting marketplace and many of the issues stemming …
Read More »ZeRo: "The issue with Evo is that we feel as a community that they don’t care about us as other titles."
Gonzalo ZeRo” Barrios is the most famous name in Smash 4, and he’s been a topic of conversation even more than usual in recent months. ZeRo, the king of Smash 4, is best known for his winning streak of more than 50 tournaments. But 2016 has been a struggle at …
Read More »The true cost of Counter-Strike skin gambling
When Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gamblers talk about the money they’ve lost, their stories follow a familiar pattern. The CS: GO player says he (usually we’re talking about a young man or a boy) developed an interest in collecting virtual in-game items, known as skins. He was also attracted to professional …
Read More »As North American League thrives with new best-of-3 format, will Europe follow?
When Riot Games announced the League Championship Series in 2012, bringing a fully professional league run by the company to North America and Europe, amongst the many other decisions made one that probably did not attract much attention at the time: the regular season would be made up of single-game …
Read More »Hero Limit: Why Not 6 Winstons?
Blizzard doesn’t want a hero limit although many players and tournament organizers do. What are the arguments on both sides of the debate? MOBAs follow the convention of only allowing one or two unique heroes on a map. Why is Overwatch giving free reign? After all, the character element came …
Read More »The top 10 players competing at Evo 2016
In two days, over 15,000 contenders will gather to compete in the world’s largest fighting game tournament: the Evolution Championship Series (Evo). This year, the event’s set of nine titles includes Street Fighter V, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, Mortal Kombat X, Ultimate Marvel vs. …
Read More »A basic comparison of champion select trends across five major regions
Until recently, draft phases had become homogenized internationally. Watching a game in a given major league followed the same patterns. Spectators expressed irritation that "everyone was just copying Korea." That seems to have changed this summer, as teams within leagues and leagues themselves have begun to prioritize different picks. Looking …
Read More »Regulating The Billion-Dollar ESports World Is Nearly Impossible
There’s a new Esports sheriff in town, ready to combat the influx of gamblers and would-be match fixers that have descended upon the burgeoning, soon-to-be $1.9 billion dollar industry, hoping to stem the tide of rigged games that have plagued the world of professional gaming of late. Read more on …
Read More »Analyzing Clash Royale’s tournament feature: esports as a marketing tool
After creating a competitive mobile hits like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, and being valued at roughly $10 billion after the Tencent buy, we think Supercell has a pretty good chance of making quite a splash into the esports industry. And, as we said already, Clash Royale has the …
Read More »Kjaerbye and karrigan talk new Astralis roster
Perhaps the biggest and most surprising roster change in Counter-Strike this year was the transfer of Markus Kjaerbye” Kjrbye from Team Dignitas to Astralis and Rene cajunb” Borg going in the other direction. At the time, both sides were struggling and seemed to be in need of some kind of …
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