It has now been confirmed that ESPN is planning to broadcast the final top 8 bracket of this month’s Street Fighter V tournament at the Evo Championship Series in Las Vegas, live on ESPN2.

With over 5,000 entrants registered for the SFV tournament this year, and the final eight players will be competing for the first place prize on live television – a major step up from years past when eSports was still seen as something the ‘general public’ would never want to view. Coverage will begin on ESPN2 from 7PM PDT (10PM EDT / 3AM BST) on July 17 (18 BST) and will also be available online at WatchESPN or Twitch’s CapcomFighters channel, as usual.

“The Street Fighter V World Championship will be one of the must-see competitions from the Evo finals,” said John Lasker, VP of programming and acquisitions at ESPN. “We are always exploring ways to serve the growing and passionate audience of competitive gaming, and we look forward to delivering this event to fans.”

ESPN’s had a growing interest in the broadcast of eSports since last year, when they broadcast the Heroes of the Dorm tournament. At the time former TV and radio anchor Colin Cowherd was not a fan of this, famously saying that he would quit if he was ever ‘forced’ to talk about ‘kids playing games’. He was suspended from ESPN in July of last year and ESPN has since opened an eSports department of the news site; having already aired several eSports tournaments.

Diablo fans were disappointed when the rumours of an expansion to their favourite game didn’t turn out to be true for Blizzcon 2015 (in fact I remember seeing disappointed Tweets across my dashboard about that time). Now however there’s some evidence that a whole new game might be on the books, at least if we’re guessing right by the job listings recently listed by Blizzard.

The main one that has caught attention is that of one looking for a Game Director for an as-of-yet unannounced Diablo Project. This suggests that the current Diablo III Game Director Josh Mosqueira has either moved on or is spearheading something else in the company that leaves him unable to work on this new project. Of course, the listing could just be for ethical, legal or business reasons and Mosqueira could be in the running still or could still be planned to get the role. It’s all speculation right now though.

Until something more concrete is revealed, that’s about all we can do.

Video game movies seem to be everywhere right now, with game series such as Assassin’s Creed and Five Nights At Freddy’s having rumoured projects in the works and in the case of the former, a lot of hype beginning to build around a film coming soon to cinemas. Minecraft is another such game to have a project attached, and now we have a speculative release date for it.

Minecraft: The Movie will release on May 24th… 2019.

The official Mojang announcement on the date says, “Yes, that might seem like a long time away, but it just so happens to be the right amount of time to make it completely awesome. And we all want an awesome Minecraft movie, right?”

Yes, that would be nice. Video game movie adaptions don’t exactly have a great reputation – they’re usually terrible and only few ever manage to beat that. Given Minecraft’s open-world, sandbox nature god knows what sort of a story they’re going to pull from it; but open world does mean a lot of possibilities as well so I guess we’ll wait and see.

People attached to the project so far include the LEGO Movie producer Roy Lee doing the production with his Vertigo Entertainment production compnay as well as Jill Messick also helping with production. Other than that, details are still sparse.

Well, at least we’ve some idea now of when we can expect to start seeing actual news about the film. Right?

Recently Ford, the car manufacturer has been sending out an ad campaign with the word ‘Freedom’ emblazoned under an art piece of a wooden watch cabin in the midst of trees tinted orange by a setting sun. It’s beautiful and evokes a sense of getting away from it all with your car… and should also look startlingly familiar to anyone well acquainted with the game Firewatch – it’s artwork made for that game and what’s more it looks like Ford never got permission to USE it in their e-mail ad campaign. Oops.

@BeefythePaladin yes and of course not.

— Olly Moss (@ollymoss) June 27, 2016

It seems that the ad might be just for a single dealership in Quincy, Massachusetts; but when Game Informer called up said dealership they didn’t seem too troubled about it.

“I guess that whoever made the email blast must have grabbed it from the website or something,” they were told, before being hung up on when they asked about their official process for sourcing artwork.

The Firewatch team are at least having a little fun with it on Twitter now, but it’s a stark reminder that even after so many years there are still people on the Internet who see anything they can find on Google as ‘fair game’.

It has previously been mentioned by Blizzard that they were planning to balance the console and PC versions of their game Overwatch separately to avoid accusations of one platform ‘ruining’ it for the other platform. Now the first change in this manner is being made, with an incoming patch set to nerf the damage of Torbjörn’s turret.

Comparing the win rates for Torbjörn, they come in as 59.6% for PC but 68% for consoles. While that doesn’t seem like a big markup, you have to remember just how popular Overwatch is. During its first full release week players totalled up 119 million hours of play across all platforms, and many, many copies have sold. Heck, even as I write this someone else across the room is currently playing the game – 10% is a fairly large percentage in this context.

Game director for Overwatch Jeff Kaplan spoke about the upcoming nerf patch on a Reddit topic saying “In an upcoming patch, we will reduce the damage done by Torbjörn’s turret by 30% on Xbox One and PS4. PC will remain unchanged.”

The patch should be coming sometime towards the end of the month once it clears certification and is just the first step on the plan to balance each game separately.

Separate balancing might sound like a lot of unnecessary work for Blizzard but I’m in favour of it. Remember, PC gamers have more choice of input devices while console players usually only have use of their game controllers. As well, the way you will play games on each platform also varies, with console users having less distractions than a PC player who might also be connected into a Discord buzzing with messages or their Skype. Separate balancing for each version therefore makes sense because each platform is bound to have their own little quirks that could make a hero overbalanced on one platform but not the other. If nothing else, it’s nice to see Blizzard taking a chance by trying something a little bit different with one of their games.