The staff at ZAM has spent many hours debating which games we’ve played over the past year were most deserving of an award. In several cases the votes were neck-and-neck while others had an overwhelming victory. We had so much love to spread around that we expanded our voting categories from six to twelve this year.
Congratulations to the first six winners and runners up of 2013!
Good news, eSports nuts! Clauf GmbH, a huge media company dedicated to eSports, has launched the eSports Global Network which will attempt to unify all eSports competitions under one umbrella. As eSports continue to grow every day with exposure, Clauf GmbH seeks to combine all the game competitions across the world into one mega outlet of media gloriousness. Now you can watch a Starcraft II tourney alongside Call of Duty experts and not blink an eye. Hosted by Dan "Frodan" Chou and produced by Morgan Stone, new eSports content is coming straight to the players through ESGNTV, the network's online content feed. ESGN released a sneak peek inside their studio as they prep to do an official launch next year.
City of Steam is back as City of Steam: Arkadia!
City of Steam: Arkadia is a 3D browser-based industrial MMORPG, produced and published by the newly-independent Mechanist Games. With a ton of new systems and new content, CoS: Arkadia is primed for launch tomorrow evening, December 4th, at 9PM Eastern.
Major League Gaming's championship in Columbus, Ohio featured top tier Dota 2 action as well as the first-ever major Call of Duty: Ghosts tournament. The event started on November 22nd and concluded November 24th. In all, there was more than $186,000 in prizes up for grabs in one of the biggest events MLG has ever held.
StarCraft II's 2013 eSports season ended with a bang at BlizzCon, as the Protoss player sOs took a stunning victory. The event was one of the best in StarCraft II history, with over 120,000 viewers tuning in for the final match. Blizzard aims to address many of the problems that the community and professional players had with the WCS eSports format in the upcoming WCS 2014. StarCraft II is arguably the eSport with the highest skill cap, and provides a top tier experience for the viewer. Despite these facts, viewership is down slightly over previous SCII seasons. With the 2014 WCS season, Blizzard aims to put StarCraft II back on the eSports throne.
The 2013 WCS season was very convoluted: tournaments had overlapping schedules, there were periods of very little scheduled professional play and long running tournaments were quite condensed. WCS 2014 aims to fix this by instituting a linear schedule that is more consistent and to ensure more regular broadcasts, as well as making more time for dedicated third-party tournaments. Blizzard also promises more third-party partner tournaments that give dedicated WCS points.
With another step forward in the growing popularity of eSports, MLG has stepped up to the plate to deliver its own live streaming service, MLG.TV. At a crucial time where the streaming service Twitch hops over to consoles to make streaming easier and more accessible to the masses, MLG enters the foray with a web and mobile streaming outlet that has already seen tremendous growth in the service's pre-launch beta event--the network saw over 1,000 percent growth in media consumption and has been a huge trend in social media avenues in the past few weeks.
Major League Gaming will be kicking off its 2013 championship next weekend, starting on the 22nd of November. The three day event will have over $150,000 in prizes up for grabs.
sOs, MC, Bomber, PartinG, HyuN, Scarlett, Snute and Golden.
These are the eight top-tier competitors in next weekend’s Red Bull Battle Grounds, vying over a hefty prize pool of $50,000. A definitive who’s who of the StarCraft II scene, the match-ups at this event guaranteed to be among the best of the year. One of the most notable attendees is sOs, the very recent winner of the World Championship Series.
The WCS World Finals of StarCraft II kicked off on Friday, November 8. After three seasons of regional qualifiers and world championships, the top 16 players of the year will face off in what is possibly the hardest StarCraft II tournament of all time. The finals are at BlizzCon, Blizzard Entertainment's massive annual convention. The winner will take home a grand prize of $100,000 and a huge trophy.
Blizzard Entertainment's strategy franchise StarCraft was the first video game series to support eSports. The trend continues this weekend in the World Championship Series Season 3 Finals of StarCraft II. In Toronto, Canada, 16 of the top players from the third and final season will compete for a $40,000 grand prize.
