This past weekend, ESPN2 aired the finals of the Heroes Of The Storm “Heroes of the Dorm” tournament. Two teams of college students from Arizone State and Cal Berkely competed in Blizzard’s as yet unreleased MOBA, with Blizzard paying all four years of the winning team’s college tuition. The telecast was met with mixed reactions, with some lauding the placement of eSports on TV opposite NBA and MLB games, and others criticizing the idea, calling it ridiculously stupid. I won’t get into the frankly ignorant remarks made by ESPN’s own Colin Cowherd, although if you want to hear them for yourself click away.

In the aftermath of all the attention, much discussion has arisen about eSports and their validity. In particular, one article that caught my attention was from Re/Code, with the rather catchy headline “Video Games on ESPN? It’s Time to Stop Pretending eSports Are ‘Real’ Sports”, which you can find here. Now, being in journalism myself as well as a YouTuber, I’m no stranger to creating catchy headlines. Just look at the one you clicked on to get here. However, I find that it is at least helpful if the content of the article under that headline has at least some relationship to reality. Unfortunately in the case of the Re/Code piece, that didn’t happen.

The very idea that eSports are somehow pretending to be “real” sports is, frankly, ludicrous. As many readers will know, I head the eSports coverage for this site and have followed the eSports scene for many years. In all my time covering StarCraft, StarCraft II, League of Legends, DOTA2, Smite and other games, I have never once heard anyone involved with the eSports community refer to it as anything other than eSports or competitive gaming. Likewise, competitors are never referred to as athletes. Instead they are commonly referenced (by themselves as well as casters and media) as competitive gamers. The reason for this is simple: eSports/competitive gaming and pro gamer/competitive gamer are descriptive terms. They literally describe what the activity or participant is. So, you aren’t off to a good start when the title of your article contains a patently false statement.

Moving on, lets address the idea of channel surfers shouting “Nerds!” and flipping past the event. eSports doesn’t need TV. It never has, and never will.  As I write this article, there are 257,027 people watching eSports on Twitch.tv. On a Tuesday evening. There are no major events going on. These are simply people that want to watch eSports. We live in an on demand society. Cable TV is going the way of the dinosaur with subscriber numbers dropping consistently as people “cut the cord” and turn to Netflix, YouTube and Twitch for instant, tailor made entertainments. In the final analysis, all the investors in eSports see is viewer numbers. The International, DOTA2’s World Championship, turned in viewer numbers that are usually only rivaled by things like golf’s Masters, the Superbowl and the State of the Union address. The very concept that the eSports leagues care at all what people on network television think of their content is ludicrous. This also ties into another statement made in the Re/Code article: that calling eSports a sport is like calling a YouTube video a TV show. Nobody does that. And as I pointed out above, eSports doesn’t call itself a sport.

Indeed, the idea that Blizzard, Valve and Riot are attempting to turn the ground-up phenomenon of eSports into something bigger is completely accurate. If a bit outdated. StarCraft is huge. It has been for years. Likewise for Counterstrike, LoL and DOTA2. The phenomenon has already arrived. It’s sitting on Twitch.tv right now, commanding a massive amount of views. The idea that these companies somehow have an inferior complex and must try to get onto ESPN to validate some juvenile need to be accepted is laughable. Certainly, the advertising revenue from televising a few events hasn’t hurt the scene any. But it is no way critical to the survival, or even growth of eSports.

I’ll leave you with one final thought:

Last year, ESPN president John Skipper said of competitive gaming: “It’s not a sport – it’s a competition.” Bravo Mr. Skipper. You understand what the rest of us already understand. It is a competition. We don’t call it a sport. Nor does anyone else. I’m not in the habit of calling out other writers, but in this case I’ll make an exception and remind all those that are reading this of the number one rule of writing: Research. Or, rather, since the article in question contained numerous links to sources that I would certainly consider research…make sure you actually read and understand you research before making statements on it that will potentially endanger someone’s life due to asphyxia from hysterical laughter. I know I had a bit of trouble breathing after reading that article.

What do you think readers? Sound off in the comments below.

Okay, he didn’t exactly say that – but close enough!

Mighty No.9, often seen as Keiji Inafune’s spiritual successor to Mega Man – a franchise he originally created, but no longer controls as a result of leaving Capcom – was a phenomenal success on Kickstarter, smashing its original $900,000 target fourfold; and funding campaigns outside Kickstarter have only put more cash into the kitty. As a result of the huge fan base, the game has quickly grown from its original concept, growing from six to eight stages in the main story mode, introducing Japanese and French voiceovers, extra subtitle languages, an extra level, boss and playable character – not to mention it’s now planned to hit almost every current and previous-gen console under the sun!

With the game growing to such a massive extent, Keiji’s team, Comcept, have now teamed up with a secondary publisher, Deep Silver — the publisher behind Saints Row, Homefront and Dead Island – to get the game released on to all the supported platforms as quickly as possible. However, in order to allow all the cool stuff to be added, Comcept have been forced to admit – via a Kickstarter update – that they will miss the original planned launch window of “Spring 2015”; and instead, will be delaying the game’s release until September.

“Before you despair, please, hear us out first!” Comcept writes. “The reason for the delay, and the reason we are so excited about this new partnership in the first place, is all the cool stuff it will allow us to add to the game.” The deal with Deep Silver will not impact any Kickstarter backer rewards, Comcept says.

We’ll leave you with the promotional imagery they published to excite you while you wait:

As part of its development of the parkour zombie-survival game, Dying Light, its developer Techland has decided that it really wants to see its players have fun with its game. To that end they’ve let modders run wild on the game, with its Steam Workshop being fairly strong. Now Techland are planning to introduce new tools.

Among the new features being added are tools needed to modify the terrain itself, multiplayer mode editing and support for the addition of custom-made models to the game, similar to the way Garry’s Mod allows for it. Techland are planning to constantly update and tweak these tools to keep them interesting and up-to-date.

The level of control is unknown right now as is the release date, but more details should hopefully emerge soon. Stay tuned.

The update to 1.8 was painful for modders of Minecraft, with so much code in the backend of the program changing that a lot of mods would have required a complete restructure to continue working. Thus most modders just didn’t update, which has resulted in a lot of modpacks using 1.6.4 or 1.7.2 versions of the game to keep everything working.

With the 1.9 update coming, Mojang have decided that there won’t be such a big leap this time. Taking to Twitter staff member SeargeDP assured players that because there will be mainly gameplay changes in this patch, it will be “less painful” for modders.

This of course still mean that you need to update mods to work with 1.8 first, but at least there won’t be too much more work to be done to make your mods work with the next version. Heck, you can probably update to work with 1.9 when it comes out, ‘skipping’ 1.8 entirely.

One of the gameplay changes that was mentioned will be an update to the Ender Dragon, making it behave more like its console counterpart.

So there’s been some demonstration of the Xbox app that will be coming with Windows 10, and depending on your gaming needs you either know you’ll be making use of it (Lone) or couldn’t care less (Digm). Or possibly you just don’t know (me).

One of the functions it will come with though will be useful to small content creators who wish to grab footage of their games. The Game DVR that is included with the app will allow for the use of Windows to capture said footage, eliminating the need for a third-party program to do that very task.

The app will capture either the most recent 30 seconds or can be set to start and stop manually. There’s a few options for length and audio/visual quality and having it built-in seems like a very good thing. The only question mark over it as far as I’m concerned is how much of a performance hog it’ll turn out to be. Maybe also ones over how good the quality capture can be set (and whether it does capture at that quality) and the format of the video/audio output. Also, can you separate game audio from microphone audio?

… Okay, so maybe there’s more than one question mark over it.

Either way, sounds like Microsoft are observing what gamers want, so that’s good. Hope it works decently.