What do Serena Williams, Kevin Durant, Simone Biles, and SonicFox all have in common? They’re all nominated alongside other dominant athletes to be recognized at ESPN’s 2019 ESPY award ceremony. For the first time, esports professionals will be recognized with its own award category alongside four other new categories.
The nominees for the “Best Esports Moment” cover a large chunk of the professional competitive gaming industry. The nominees highly notable moments in fighting games, MOBAs, and first-person shooters and highlights competitions all around the world. The six nominees for “Best Esports Moment” are:
Dominique “SonicFox” McLean and the Cloud9 team were also recognized during The Game Awards at the end of 2018. Both won in their respective categories: Best Esports Player and Best Esports Team.
ESPY stands for excellence in sports performance yearly and the award ceremony was started in 1993. Categories are voted on by sportswriters, executives, experts on the individual sports, broadcasters and fans. ESPN is also teaming up with eBay to run the ESPYs Sweepstakes where winners get a chance to play Apex Legends against esports stars and celebrities in the ESPN EXP Pro-Am. The $5 donation that is required for entry benefits the V Foundation, an organization focused on cancer research.
The four other new categories are Best Boxer, Best MMA Fighter, Best WWE Moment, and Best Viral Moment. Though not featured in the four nominees this year, esports could potentially be nominated in the Best Viral Moment category as the industry continues to grow. Best Breakthrough Athlete and Best Male/Female Athlete would be an almost impossible feat to accomplish in the near future but there are a handful of categories that aren’t earmarked for specific sports where esports could earn nominations. Even if they don’t for a long while, being included in the ESPYs with an original category is a major accomplishment and a new avenue for gaining exposure.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.