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Fans are mad at one of the biggest 'League of Legends' teams
Winning a professional League of Legends title is tough. Keeping fans happy, one esports organization has learned, can be even tougher.
Overwatch League adds new teams from Rams, Cloud9 owners
Blizzard's official professional esports league for Overwatch continues to round into shape, and today announced two more franchises have been purchased. That puts the count at nine teams total, including the two announced today with one in Los Angeles established by Stan and Josh Kroenke (a family that already holds ownership stakes in the LA Rams, Arsenal Football Club, Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche). The other goes to Cloud9 owner Jack Etienne, whose company already operates ten esports teams, including one for Overwatch.
The traditional sports world is taking eSports into the mainstream
Five years ago, you couldn't have imagined video game competitions being broadcasted on the same channel as traditional sports. TV networks have been historically obsessed with pastimes such as baseball, basketball, football and soccer, but times are changing. Thanks to the massive popularity of eSports, driven in large part by the internet-streaming generation, the entertainment landscape has transformed drastically over the past couple of years. Nowadays, US channels like Disney XD, ESPN, NBC and TBS are all trying to put eSports on the same level as traditional sports, with the end goal being to reach new, younger audiences. Want to watch a EA's FIFA or Rocket League tournament on ESPN? Well, you can do just that.
Top eSports league will begin drug testing players
The Electronic Sports League has announced that it will soon begin testing players for performance enhancing substances at future competitive events. The organization told Motherboard that it won't share details just yet, but will institute measures to police, educate and prevent drug taking on its watch. The news comes in the wake of the revelations made by professional Counter-Strike player Cory Friesen about he and his team, Cloud 9. Friesen told an interviewer that they had all taken the psychostimulant Adderall to boost performance during a recent tournament in Poland.
'League of Legends' doc chronicles America's eSports underdogs
Patrick Creadon wants to tell you about what he thinks is competitive gaming's Miracle on Ice moment. And to do so, he's employing the tool he knows best: a movie camera. Whereas before, the film director has focused on the national debt with I.O.U.S.A. or the (sometimes famous) people who love crossword puzzles in Wordplay, his latest project, All Work All Play, tackles the world of eSports. Specifically, League of Legends and two American dark horse teams quite literally going up against the rest of the world in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans packed into, ironically enough, hockey arenas. "eSports teams don't have the respect that they so badly crave," he says. "These North American teams are not unlike the 1980 United States hockey team going up against Russia [in the Olympics]. Our movie really captures a similar story."
