Speedrun: Issue 4 | Franchises, Record Breaking Prize Pools, and of course - More Partnerships
Activision Blizzard revealed two new franchises for its upcoming Call of Duty League, Nike and FURIA team up, Official Teamfight Tactics Tournament, The International 2019’s breaks record, Astralis and Logitech partnership, and Twitch’s new Subscriber Streaming service may actually cause issues.
Los Angeles and Minnesota Purchase Franchises
Image courtesy of Activision
Activision Blizzard announced two new franchises, bringing the current total up to seven, for the upcoming Call of Duty League. These spots cost a reported $25 million each.
WISE Ventures has secured the Minnesota spot, and Immortals Gaming Club the Los Angeles franchise. Below is a list of all seven franchises:
Atlanta - Atlanta Esports Ventures
Dallas – Team Envy
New York - Sterling VC with New York Mets owner
Paris - c0ntact Gaming, LLC
Toronto - OverActive Media
Minnesota – WISE Ventures
Los Angeles – Immortals Gaming Club
Nike + FURIA
Image courtesy of FURIA
Esports organization FURIA revealed that its latest partnership is with multinational sportswear brand Nike.
The partnership is a four year deal, which started last week when they revealed their newest uniforms for their CS:GO team at ESL One Cologne.
The contract with Nike will extend to FURIA’s other lineups, as well.
Riot Announces First Official Teamfight Tactics Tournament
Image courtesy of Riot
Riot Games announced the first tournament for its ranked League of Legends game mode Teamfight Tactics. This tournament will take place next week, July 17-18 and will be hosted by Twitch Rivals.
Sixty-four Twitch streamers will be invited to participate for a chance of winning piece of the $125K prize pool. The full roster will be announced today.
Astralis and Logitech Sign Two Year Peripherals Partnership
Image courtesy of Astralis
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team Astralis has partnered with peripherals brand Logitech G.
In addition to Astralis using the brand’s peripherals during competition, they will also advise on the development of future Logitech G products.
Astralis only competes in CS:GO, and has been dominant over the past year. They have brought home some major hardware, winning multiple major tournaments and racking in over $4M USD in prizes.
The International 2019 prize pool surpasses last year’s record
There are eight weeks left until the event begins, and the International 2019 has already hit the biggest prize pool in Dota 2 history.
The main event starts on August 20th, and the prize pool is already sitting well above $25 million. The prize pool for the tournament is crowd-funded, so clearly people area excited.
Twitch’s New Subscriber-Only Streaming Option Issues
Image courtesy of Twitch
Twitch’s new Subscriber Stream feature that allows content creators to broadcast exclusively to their paid subscription may actually be less exciting than we originally thought.
In an attempt to give streamers additional ways to incentivize viewers to subscribe, Twitch began beta testing Subscriber Streams in late June.
As a way to increase the number of ways that streamers can incentivize paying for subscriptions, Twitch began beta testing for these Subscriber Streams on June 26.
Quickly thereafter, people starting noticing that these subscriber-only streams may actually violate some game developers’ terms-of-service, because some state that monetizing videos and content of their games is acceptable, but videos must be “non-commercial.”
Twitch has not said anything about these findings as of yet.
That’s it for this (last) week! See you again soon.
