It seems that when the public discovered that two prominent Youtubers (ProSyndicate and TmarTn) were owners of a CSGO Gambling site that they have heavily promoted without disclosure of their connection to the site a spotlight was shone upon a very secretive dark corner. A lot more has come out involving other sites and other prominent content-creators on both Youtube and Twitch. Now a set of Skype logs has been leaked that seem to implicate a Twitch streamer who became well known after he was swatted while on-air.

James “PhantomL0rd” Varga suffered the swatting back in 2013 as one of the earliest victims of the “prank”. Now a hacker aiming to steal from a French target, Duhau Joris, a French web developer who owns the domain of gambling site CSGOShuffle, has leaked out to Richard Lewis a games and esports journalist. Watch his video here:

The Skype logs in question seem to prove that PhantomL0rd has at least a vested interest in the site, if not having some part in owning the business. Previously the streamer had claimed that the site only sponsored him when questions were raised in the wake of the CSGOLotto scandal earlier.

There are also implications that streamed pots might have been rigged in order to make the site more enticing to viewers by showing what could be won if they are only willing to come along and bet away their in-game items and skins in hopes of winning more.

Others implicated in this include cAre, one of the most well-known and prolific skin gamblers in the CS:GO trading scene right now, in that he might too have taken part in pots he knew were rigged (logs to do with his involvement are being translated still from the native French of cAre and Joris); as well as suggestions that PhantomL0rd is aware that another CSGOWild is affliated with an eSports organisation, FaZe. He also seemed to know of Syndicate’s involvement with CSGOLotto as far back as November of last year.

“Also [CSGOLotto] the syndicate site and [CSGOWild] by the cod faze guys,” Varga says. “I’m talking to both looking into what they’re doing and if its [sic] a threat or not.”

In the wake of exposure of shady and underhanded dealings to do with many CSGO gambling sites and content creators, Valve has recently put a stop to third-party gambling sites as they were ruled to violate Terms of Service that had been in place since 2010.

As always, when watching a content creator always be wary. Even with rules and laws in place, sometimes things aren’t always as they seem.

A community manager for Battlefield has updated the situation on when we can expect there to be an open beta for the latest Battlefield game, Battlefield 1.

During a livestream interview through Reddit, community manager Sebastian Moritz hinted that the open beta time was set to kick off sometime “shortly after” this year’s Gamescom even, which will run from August 17th to August 21st. This puts the beta launching somewhere in the later part of August, probably during the last week or maybe even during the first week of September. No dates were confirmed but given that Gamescom is going to happen before the beta it’s possible they might announce some during that event.

When it does arrive Battlefield Insiders will be getting their access three days earlier to hit the ground running, as well as being offered some “in-game rewards, exclusive content and sneak peeks at news about Battlefield”, probably before its released publicly.

Among other things confirmed during that livestream interview was the inclusion of a Rush mode, among other things. Check the Reddit topic for more information and a link to the Twitch channel containing the interview.

Grow Home was quite a successful little game. For those of you who missed out, Grow Home saw one little droid’s quest to grow as much green as possible to reoxygenate his homeworld, mainly through the use of giant, ever branching beanstalk vines that he rode to climb ever higher. Now the sequel game has an announced release date and it’s pretty soon.

Grow Home’s sequel Grow Up was announced at E3 last month, and will see the Botonical Utility Droid journeying ever higher through a “new open-world” as he tries to recover the parts of his lost spacecraft MOM (and I would assume reassemble it too. In a blog post about the game Ubisoft Reflections reveals that BUD will be accompanied by a new flying companion named POD and will also have access to a new device called the Floradex 3000, a device that will allow for BUD’s cloning of the game’s 24 different plant species to allow for easier passage as BUD makes his way to his ultimate target destination of the homeworld’s moon.

Grow Up will be coming to PC and the Xbox One and PS4 on August 16th.

Check out the game’s E3 announcement trailer below:

There’s nothing better than playing old-school classic games on the original hardware. Sure, software emulators, Nintendo’s Virtual Console, and Steam re-releases may make it far easier to play older games and even bring them with you, but there’s just something about using the original controllers and playing on dedicated hardware that just feels right. Problem is, when those consoles are approaching three decades old, are chunky as hell, and the cartridges likely to now be rusted-out and playable – not to mention they use the kind of outputs like coaxial cables that are practically unheard of on modern generation TVs – who really wants to go to the effort of setting up an original NES once again to play games like Castlevania the way they were meant to be played?

If you’re one of the people who agrees with everything I just said, you might find Nintendo’s newest product announcement of interest. Enter the Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition, a mini replica of the original console. The NES Classic Edition is designed to give you the feel of playing on original NES Hardware – the controller even looks and feels like the original – while removing all the inconveniences. While it won’t read your cartridges, the NES Classic Edition packs in 30 of the NES’s classic titles, which together offer a well-rounded sample of the best of NES history even if there are some decidedly odd choices – SUPER C but not the original Contra? Come on, Nintendo!

The full list of included games runs as follows: Balloon Fight, Bubble Bobble, Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Double Dragon II: The Revenge, Dr. Mario, Excitebike, Final Fantasy, Galaga, Ghosts’n Goblins, Gradius, Ice Climber, Kid Icarus, Kirby’s Adventure, Mario Bros., Mega Man 2, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, Pac-Man, Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream, StarTropics, SUPER C, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Tecmo Bowl, The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

All this is packed into a miniaturised replica of the original NES hardware that’s small enough stand on your outstretched palm. The package also includes a HDMI cable so that the games can be played on modern HDTVs, and a single NES Classic Controller. The controllers and ports use the Firewire standard as used on the Wii Controller for its accessories – so sorry, original NES peripherals won’t work here, like they’d have much use anyway.

The system launches this November 11th for $59.99 across North America and the UK. However, it is interesting to note that the UK edition will not launch with its own AC adapter, which is included with the North American edition. Cheers for that, Nintendo. We still remember the 3DS XL…

Pokemon Go is taking the world by storm (at least in the places it’s available), and it seems that Niantic Labs is planning to make this work for them, by making the little game a money-earner in more wsays than just one.

The microtransactions in the game were a bit of a given and known about well before the game’s release, and now the secondary part of the money-earning has been lined out – sponsorship deals.

Like Niantic’s previous game of Ingress, Pokemon Go will have companies pay for their places to become ‘sponsored locations’. This means that special promotions of events will be available within those places, making players flock towards them in great numbers and hopefully meaning that every player who checks in and buys one of the sponsored locations products will get Niantic a little bit of cash. Sounds odd but the last week or so has shown that players will flock to places with Lures to catch rarer Pokemon so it’s a feasible way of making money.

Even though no specific plans have officially been set forward, some people have already figured out that McDonalds is likely to be the first of many sponsorship companies involved. Reddit user  tf2manu posted a snippet of the game’s source code that actually mntions McDonalds as a sponsor with fellow user KcYoung adding that the McDonalds logo is already in the game’s resource files with the usual clothing textures and icons.

This sort of thing doesn’t come as too big of a surprise really given that the game needs to make money to continue its servers staying online, and if you frequent the sponsored locations you’ll be getting rewards too. Maybe McDonalds isn’t your thing, but future locations will probably be added down the line and we’ve no idea who they could be yet.