Live ‘League of Legends’ coverage is coming to BBC Three

The BBC will tap into the popular world of eSports next week by offering live coverage of the League of Legends World Championships for the first time. From October 15th, BBC Three will deliver action from all four days of the quarter finals at Wembley, with Radio 1 DJ Dev Griffin hosting proceedings. He’ll be joined by gaming casters Leigh ‘Deman’ Smith and James ‘Stress’ O’Leary, who will offer additional context on the action as it unfolds.

League of Legends is a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game that pits two teams of between three and five players against each other. They start opposite sides of a map and are tasked with destroying their opponents’ “Nexus.” More than 27 million gamers play it every day and the BBC says over 70 million hours of last year’s championships watched by fans from all over the world.

The broadcaster will use a system normally reserved for live sporting events and Glastonbury coverage to deliver live and pre-recorded video, text updates, audio and social updates. If you’ve ever followed Premier League updates on the BBC Sport website then you’ll know what to expect.

In March, we posited that 2015 would be the breakout year for eSports. In the past six months alone, league organiser Gfinity opened its first dedicated venue in London, video game retailer GAME acquired Multiplay and has begun hosting tournaments in stores and even major bookmakers are taking bets on major eSports events. With the BBC behind it, the movement looks set to become even more mainstream, and that can only be a good thing.

Source: BBC Media Centre

Video game voice actors vote a resounding ‘yes’ to strike

Last month the Screen Actor’s Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists started the process to strike in an effort to be better compensated. Now, the union members have voted and over 96 percent feel that a strike is in order to protect themselves. As a refresher, the organized voice actors are asking for royalties on games they performed in that sell over two million copies, stunt pay for particularly stressful roles (those sustained screams and yells can do damage) and stunt coordinators for certain situations, among other things. Where do the actors like the cast of The Last of Us up above go from here? Back to the collective bargaining table. This vote doesn’t mean that the union will strike, but it gives them the option to do so if negotiations fall apart.

[Image credit: Imeh Akpanudosen via Getty Images]

Via: IGN

Source: Screen Actors Guild

‘Indivisible’ is a hand-drawn JRPG that needs your help

The folks behind Skullgirls are at it again, and this time they’re taking to crowdfunding platform IndieGoGo for a hand in creating a gorgeous hand-drawn role-playing game, Indivisible. As BoingBoing points out, perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of the whole deal here is how it’s being funded. The game’s total budget is $3.5 million, and if the IndieGoGo campaign reaches its $1.5 million goal, publisher 505 Games (Adr1ft, Abzu) will kick in the balance. If you’re hesitant about throwing money down, there’s a demo prototype available that you can download for Windows.

Lab Zero’s already updated it with fan-requested features and says that it’ll transfer the build of the game to Steam and “periodically” update it as production goes on. Indivisible also features a score by Secret of Mana composer Hiroki Kikuta. Oh, and should you be left wondering how it’ll play, Lab Zero describes it as “inspired by classics like Valkyrie Profile and Super Metroid. So, turn-based battles and a strong exploration element; got it.

Via: BoingBoing

Source: IndieGoGo

‘Astroneer’ is a planetary exploration game on a grand scale

Games like Kerbal Space Program are great at depicting the challenges of getting to another planet, but there isn’t usually much to do when you arrive beyond planting a flag. Wouldn’t it be nice to really, truly explore those alien worlds and make them your own? System Era may just give you that chance. Its upcoming Astroneer has you exploring and harvesting resources from vast, procedurally generated planets. You not only have to brave hostile conditions (including The Martian-like storms) and build up your base, but shape the very surface you’re walking on. You can level hills, carve out tunnels and dig out artifacts buried in the soil — think of it as Minecraft in an unfamiliar, unforgiving landscape.

The game is still in early development, and it’s only poised to hit Windows PCs (via Steam) at an undetermined point in the future. However, it’s pretty promising at first glance. The design gives you a sense of how daunting (and fascinating) real planetary exploration would be, and its purposefully simple look gives it character that you wouldn’t get if System Era was striving for absolute realism. There’s no guarantee that the finished product will play as well as it looks, of course. However, the Astroneer team includes people from big-name developers like 343 Industries, Ubisoft and Valve (among others), so there’s a real chance that the game will live up to the early hype.

Via: Shacknews

Source: Astroneer

Everything Twitch does is for its community

Twitch would be nothing without its broadcasters and viewers, and the livestreaming service is fiercely protective of both. So much so that to prevent its first-ever TwitchCon conference from transforming into a promotional event for exhibitors, rather than a meet-up for its community, the company was willing to turn down exhibitor support. The goal, as Matt DiPietro, Twitch’s VP of marketing, explained it, was to keep the show laser focused on community so it doesn’t turn into something like Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) have: huge but at the expense of their initial focus. “What TwitchCon has to be about is the broadcasters and their fans,” he said in an interview from the show. “Everything we do, we think about the broadcasters first because that’s what brings the fans and creates the content.”

To see just how far that ethos goes, I chatted with DiPietro about how and why Twitch introduces new features, where he sees the convention going next year and how the company plans to keep the conference’s relaxed vibe while expanding its footprint.

Every broadcaster I’ve talked to says that they work a ton because they feel they have to, otherwise they lose subscribers. They’re working sometimes seven days and over a hundred hours per week. Have you guys thought about that?

Burnout? Sure. I think, for the most part, the successful broadcasters find a natural equilibrium with their life. They really are pioneers in creating a career that didn’t exist before, and they’re figuring out how to do it.

For the very Twitch-specific class of partner who does Twitch full time, and sometimes that’s four, six, eight hours of broadcasting a day, the interesting thing is soon you’re going to have features like playlists and VOD uploads. So hopefully, you’ll have an arsenal and quiver of tools for making content that will allow you to have a weekend. Because it’s absolutely true and we hear it from partners all the time; particularly when we started doing events like PAX and E3 where we would start bringing our partners out to the event. They were like, “I love you guys and I really want to do that stuff, but if I take two days off, I might lose X percentage of subscribers.”

We heard that loud and clear and that’s actually why we’re building those kinds of tools: to give you more options for creating different kinds of content however you want to.

TwitchCon feels kind of self-serving — much like “Here’s how to become a better Twitch streamer.” Which is fine. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s just that TwitchCon feels like an investment in Twitch.

It’s an investment in the Twitch community, absolutely. We started talking about doing an event two years ago … a year and a half ago and, at first, the parameters were very hazy. We didn’t know quite what it would look like. What are we gonna do? When we started asking these questions very seriously, Emmett Shear, our CEO — his very clear directive from the very beginning was: “As cool as they are, I don’t want another E3, [or] another PAX.” This isn’t about PlayStation or Xbox, Blizzard or whatever.

I’m used to the madness of E3. This feels so totally different. It’s relaxed, low pressure, casual.

That’s what we wanted: a comfortable place that’s native to the community experience. The content we’re doing here is community content. We didn’t do any of it ourselves because we don’t do content. One of our larger variety broadcasts is Dropped Frames with some of our top partners. We just gave them the main stage. Do it here, do it live. Bring the fans in. And that was wildly successful. If there’s a way to see a cross section, that’s the spirit of what we try to do: Bring Twitch here.

You’d hope TwitchCon is going to grow. At what point do you push back? Let’s say Microsoft and Sony come to you and say they want you to announce new products and turn it into a trade show. PAX started as a community thing; now it’s becoming a promo event. GDC too, whereas before it was all about education. Are you going to take a heavy hand in curating the experience so that doesn’t happen?

Yes. No doubt. There’s essentially three pillars to the community: [The] broadcaster is number one. Everything we do, we think about the broadcasters first because that’s what brings the fans and creates the content; the experts that have the most passion for the games. Fans, number two. And of course, there is [the] developers and publishers, hardware and platforms. That is a very good question: how we work with the industry going forward because of course they all understand keenly now in a way that they didn’t before how influential Twitch broadcasters are.

Blizzard announced some new content on the main stage. We have a couple of games being released [here]. And that’s all fine and good and wonderful. We want that kind of thing. But the spirit should always be: If you’re coming to TwitchCon as a game developer — indie, AAA or otherwise — what are you doing for the community? How are you adding value to the community? If you don’t understand that dynamic, not only do we really not want you here, but you’re not going to get a lot of value out of being here either if you’re not engaging with the community in a native/organic way. It’s not for you.

Throughout the weekend, Twitch hosted educational panels for broadcasters.

What does TwitchCon look like next year then?

I think it’s going to look a lot like this year. It’s going to be bigger, better, more people. Probably a more defined track for developers and publishers. You can think of the attendees at this conference, 2015, as early adopters. We didn’t know what the content was, really, until a month ago. Two months ago. Most of the folks that came here came on a prayer and a blind leap of faith that “I know that Twitch is going to do something cool and I want to be there year one.” Year two, I’m expecting the 15,000 people [official counts are over 20,000] here this weekend are going to tell all their friends and say, “You gotta be there; it was awesome. Twitch did it right and did it right by the community. You’ve gotta be there next year.”

This interview has been condensed and edited

[Image credits: Twitch (Top image)]