Valve boss Gabe Newell stepped up to the stage during last week's BAFTA awards to receive the prestigious Academy Fellowship for his contributions to gaming. Presumably momentarily distracted by accepting a trophy modeled after a smirking face, a bewhiskered Newell fielded some interview questions over the normally airtight subject of Valve's business performance that hinted at the monumental scale of the studio's prosperity.

Newell chalked up Valve's successes largely to user-generated content on open platforms such as Steam Workshop before sharing some jaw-dropping numbers. "There's sort of an insatiable demand for gaming right now," Newell said. "I think our business has grown by about 50 percent on the back of opportunities created by having these open platforms.

"And just so people understand how big this sort of scale is getting, we were generating 3.5 terabits per second during the last Dota 2 update," he added. "That's about 2 percent of all the mobile- and land-based Internet activity."

Wait, what? We're not exactly sure what Newell meant when he dropped that bombshell of data info, apart from maybe claiming responsibility for all those times my connection speeds chugged while browsing these past few months. Still, it seems entirely plausible—Dota 2 has a lot of players, and the MOBA recently took the crown for the highest concurrent user amount of any Steam game ever. If any Steam game can feasibly take a bite out of the entire Internet, Dota 2 holds the best chance.

Twitch.TV, much like YouTube, now occupies a space in my internet life where I can sort of remember it not existing, but can't really conceive of it not being around. That it was launched less than two years seems like scary time-distorting magic. And given the record breaking growth that Twitch has now announced, it seems I'm not alone in obsessive digestion of gaming streams, competitions and oddities. In fact, last month, 600,000 broadcasters attracted over 28 million unique viewers.

"Twitch launched in June of 2011 and our growth ever since has exceeded even my expectations, which were not small," says Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. "A year and a half later, the community of broadcasters and viewers has multiplied hundreds of percent. Brands like Electronic Arts, Activision and Sony Online Entertainment have begun integrating Twitch directly into their products, charities have collectively raised more than three million dollars using Twitch as a platform, and conventions are now turning to Twitch as their exclusive streaming partner."

Impressively, those 28 million viewers watched an average of over 1.5 hours of video per day. Presumably the majority of that is directed at the big eSports trinity of Starcraft 2, League of Legends and Dota2. But Twitch also hosts everything from Arma squads, to indie discoveries, developer livestreams and speed-runners doing strange things to gaming's past.

Of course, Twitch isn't entirely responsible for its latest success. The recent closure of competitor Own3D surely had a hand in their record breaking month, as viewers switched over for their passive gaming fix.

Thanks, Gamespot.

This week in eSports: the Swarm approaches, and vengeance is upon us all! By this time next week, we'll have a champion for the GSL and IEM, Heart of the Swarm will be burrowed on our hard drives... and that's just StarCraft. Get off one last inject on your hatch, then 1-A your way down into this week's eSports news. gl hf!

DreamHack is back!



The premier European eSports event (and one of my personal favorites) has announced its 2013 competition: the Dreamhack Eizo Open 2013 will commence in Stockholm on April 26, with the Summer Championships to follow in June. StarCraft II players will compete for a total of over $190,000 in prizes.

Check out the official DreamHack site for more.

Heart of the Swarm launch gets its own heading in T.J.'s eSports Column



How stoked are you for HotS? How loud did you groan when I actually just used the word "stoked"? The answers don't really matter, because StarCraft II's first expansion will be here in just a few short days, bringing with it a (swarm) host of new units and features, and some massive shifts in the competitive meta. I'll be on the ground at the midnight launch party outside Blizzard HQ in Irvine to snag some interviews with devs, pros, and casters about the expansion. Watch this space for more.

As if that wasn't exciting enough, we're about 10 hours away (from the writing of this post) to the GSL 2013 Season 1 Code S finals. To put that into layman's terms: The Super Bowl of StarCraft. Korean All-Stars Symbol and RorO, both making their first apperances in a Code S final, are set to compete for the honor of being the 12th player in the game's history to be crowned Code S champion. My fellow North American eSports fans, stock up on caffeine now. It's going to be a ZvZ to remember.

Watch it: GomTV

Oh yeah, there's also a little thing called the Intel Extreme Masters VII World Championships well underway in Hanover, Germany. The Semifinals are primed for tomorrow, with a number of high-profile players having already been eliminated. You should have just enough time to catch your breath and head out for a stimpack run after the GSL finals. It's going to be a long weekend...

Watch it: Intel Extreme Masters (Currently rebroadcasting the Round of 16)

Things are not going to slow down next weekend. MLG's Winter Championships are ready to drag you away from the HotS ladder to watch players who will make your greatest successes in the opening days seem childish and half-hearted. The Winter Showdowns have concluded, with Goswser, Minigun, State, ViBE, Suppy, KiLLeR, and HuK qualifying for the main event. DIMAGA has expressed that he is unable to attend, and was replaced by Feast in a consolation bracket made up of some of the other losing players from the Winter Showdowns series.

Watch it: Major League Gaming

Other Stuff:

Day has revived the King of the Beta tournament from the pre-Wings of Liberty launch days, and only two players remain. Get caught up, and see who will claim a title that can only be awarded once an expansion.

Watch it: DayTV

League of Legends



Dignitas has held onto the lead in the North American LCS, having not dropped a match since the GGU upset on the 27th. Curse still trails one win behind, with TSM Snapdragon and CLG tied for third. The North American teams are on a two-week break at the moment, but will resume on the 15th with TSM vs GGU at MLG Winter.

Watch it: LCS North America

Across the Atlantic, Gambit BenQ has overtaken Fnatic with a 9-2 record, over the latter's 8-3. SK Gaming hangs onto third at 7-4. The European season will continue on the 16th, with EG vs Dragonborns. (Note to whoever named that team: I'm pretty sure the plural of "Dragonborn" is just "Dragonborn.")

Watch it: LCS Europe

League also has a presence at the Intel Extreme Masters VII World Championships, with only three teams remaining: CJ Entus (formerly Azubu) has seen both their teams—Frost and Blaze—mow through the bracket. Only SK Telecom T1 remains to challenge the Entus Hegemony.

Watch it: Intel Extreme Masters

The MLG Winter Championships will play host to three League events: an international exhibition featuring Dignitas, Curse, Gambit, and KT Rolster B; the Summer Promotion Qualifier, and 12 (count 'em!) North American LCS matches. The action starts with TSM vs GGU in an LCS match on March 15th at 2:30 PST.

Watch it: Major League Gaming

Dota 2



The Defense 3 has left only four survivors: Virtus.pro has knocked Dignitas into the lower bracket, where they will face the winner of Team Liquid vs Fnatic.EU for one last chance to dethrone the Russian powerhouse in the Grand Final. The winners will walk away with 10 grand, and the first major tournament victory of 2013.

Watch it: The Defense

In just six days, DreamHack will begin the online DreamHack Dota 2 Invitational, with a $6000 prize pool and an invite to Dreamhack Summer (in Sweden this June) on the line. The eight invited teams are Dignitas, Empire, Evil Geniuses, Fnatic, Mousesports, No Tidehunter, QPAD Red Pandas, and Team Liquid.

Watch it: DreamHack

That's it for this week, eSports faithful. Let us know in the comments what you think of this week's stories, if there's anything we missed, and what eSports events you're most looking forward to in the coming weeks.

Valve are currently beta testing a selection of additions and changes to Steam's Community pages. Not only have they separated out general community activity from your own contributions, and created a Community Home as an all-game version of the Game Hubs, but you can also upload artwork for any Valve game. It's not all charmingly crude MS Paint scribbles, though, as Valve's artists have created an installation for this digital gallery, featuring concept, prototypes and posters for everything from Portal to Dota 2.

Artwork can only be uploaded for Valve games right now, with the rest of Steam's extensive library set to follow in the future. To use the new features, you'll need to opt-in to the latest Steam Beta Update from Steam's settings menu. You can also view them in-browser by joining the New Steam Community Beta group.

Steam has also updated Workshop entries to provide more detailed stats to creators, as well as new tabs for each Workshop item, letting Subscribers create discussions and view a full update history. More details of that update here.

Last night, the (still technically unreleased) Dota 2 beta registered a peak of 297,000 players. This broke the previous record, set by Skyrim, by almost 10,000, making it the most-played game on Steam by concurrent users in history. With the rate they're sending out free keys, this doesn't really surprise me.

Dota 2 is still a long way from scratching its archrival, League of Legends, who reports active players in the millions at this point. Still, considering the popularity of the Steam platform, it's nothing to shake an Iron Branch at. It's been about a year and a half since the game's soft launch at The International in 2011. League, for comparison, has been around for almost four years, counting from the start of open beta.

Hopefully, this rising popularity will lead to more of an in-person tournament scene for Dota as an eSport, which somewhat disappointingly exists mostly in the realm of online competitions.

via PCGamesN

This week in eSports: the death knell sounds for IPL6, but an announcement from QuakeCon gives us something different to look forward to. Things have come right down to the wire in The Defense 3 and the GSL, and the next MLG is right around the corner. There may be no better time this year to 6 pool or gank your friends into giving eSports a look. gl hf!

IPL 6 officially canceled
Last week, we reported on how the restructuring at IGN had led to the parent company searching for a buyer for the IGN ProLeague. No further announcements have been made in terms of where it might end up, but we can now confirm that this month's IPL6 event has been canceled. Teams from StarCraft II and ShootMania Storm are having to cancel their plans, and GameSpot reports that the League of Legends Korean Qualifiers have been axed. We haven't heard from Riot or the teams themselves when the Koreans will get another shot, but we'll keep you posted.

QuakeCon 2013 announced
In significantly better news, we have dates for this year's QuakeCon in Dallas: August 1-4. This will be the 18th iteration of one of the world's biggest LAN parties, and an epicenter of competitive gaming since before "eSports" was even a word. The announcement page teases more details to come. We'll update you with the eSports-specific announcements as soon as we get them.

StarCraft II


Symbol. RorO. They may not be the most well-known names in Wings of Liberty outside of Korea, but that doesn't matter anymore. They are the only two players left standing in the GSL Code S. Playing for Azubu and Samsung Khan, respectively, the Zerg Ultra-Grandmasters will throw down in a best of seven a week from tomorrow, for possibly the most prestigious crown a single player can earn in eSports.

Watch it: GomTV

As if next week needed even more StarCraft (What am I saying? You can never have too much StarCraft), the Intel Extreme Masters Season VII World Championships go live on Tuesday in Hanover, Germany. 24 of the best players from South Korean and Europe will compete over four days for $100,000 in prizes, leaving off just in time for you to make a run to the store for a case of energy drinks and catch the GSL finals.

Watch it: Intel Extreme Masters

Make sure you're rested up for the week after, though. We've got the Heart of the Swarm Midnight Launch and the MLG 2013 Winter Championship coming up on the 14th and 15th, respectively. New qualifiers for the Winter Championship through the Winter Showdowns series since last week include Mvp, Seed, MarineKing, MC, TaeJa, Polt, Sen, Feast, and, in an upset over DongRaeGu, the relatively unknown jjakji. IdrA vs Minigun is set for this Sunday, one of the more anticpated matches of the series. Suppy, ViBE, Illusion, and HuK also still have their spots on the line.

Watch it online: Major League Gaming
Watch it in person: Passes are still available for the Winter Championships, but it probably won't stay that way for long. You can grab one for $35.

Other Stuff
 
The Heart of the Swarm midnight launch events are going to feature some high-profile show matches, and a who's who of the pro caster community. Blizzard has officially-sanctioned events going on in nine countries, and outlets like Team Liquid are organizing even more. If you're going to be in the Irvine, CA area on the 14th, you can join Day, Husky, Polt, MC... and myself, as well as several of the senior devs, for the U.S. event.

League of Legends


Dignitas has overtaken Curse in the North American LCS, with a 9-2 record over Curse's 8-2. Dignitas has an opportunity to tie that up tonight at 5 PST if they can topple TSM Snapdragon. A loss would tie them up with TSM (Currently 7-3) for the second place spot. CLG is hanging on in fourth with 6-4. compLexity and GGU still can't seem to catch a break, each with only one win so far.

Watch it: League Championship Series North America

Over on the European side of things, Fnatic holds the lead at 7-1, with Gambit BenQ close behind at 6-2. They face off tomorrow at 19:00 CET (Noon PST), in a match that could close the gap to almost nothing if Gambit pulls out a win (depending on what happens in Fnatic vs Copenhagen Wolves).

Watch it: League Championship Series Europe

Other Stuff
 
The League of Legends Mac client has gone into open beta, heralding the potential for even more explosive growth for Riot's rising star. You can download the beta and give it a shot for yourself right now.



Patch 3.03 is bringing some changes for Amumu (which is almost as hard to spell as banana), Taric, and Kale. You can check out all the details in the video above.

Dota 2


From the brutal fray, four teams are left standing in The Defense 3. North America's Dignitas and Russia's Virtus.Pro are set to reignite the Cold War in the upper bracket. Both dominated their Round 3 opponents 2-0, and have lost only one game each in the playoffs so far. In the lower bracket, the winner of Evil Geniuses vs Team Liquid (both of North America) will have a chance to face the loser of the upper bracket final for a spot in the championship match. Dignitas vs VP is scheduled for 11 a.m. PST tomorrow, with EG vs Liquid to immediately follow.

Watch it: The Defense

Other Stuff
 
The Dota 2 client has been updated to include the first part of the new player experience, unlocking a set of single-player tutorials with a loose story that are reminiscent of the old WarCraft 3 scenarios. According to the official blog post, "Dota’s a deep game, and there’s a lot of things to learn, but we felt it was important that the learning was entertaining in itself, so we’ve tried to avoid building a dry tutorial."

A lot of things can be said about Dota, but few would dispute the reality of its reputation for being punishing on newbies. If you're relatively fresh to the game and have had a minute to try the new tutorials out, we're curious to hear your thoughts.

That's it for this week, eSports faithful. Let us know in the comments what you think of this week's stories, if there's anything we missed, and what eSports events you're most looking forward to in the coming weeks.

gg!