After a grueling nine-day qualifying tournament, eight of the best Hearthstone players in the Western hemisphere have risen to the top of a pool of 40, and will compete for the title of Americas Champion on Oct. 10-11 in San Francisco. In addition to the title, the players are competing for a $25,000 prize pool. The top four players from the Americas Championship will advance to BlizzCon, where they will compete with twelve of the best players from Asia and Europe for a $250,000 prize pool and the glory of being the Hearthstone world champion.
The eight competing players are:
The event will be hosted by eSports personality Rachel “Seltzer” Quirico. Live match commentary will be provided by Dan “Frodan” Chou, TJ “Azumo” Sanders, Brian Kibler, Robert “Whirthun” Wing, Janne “Savjz” Mikkonen, Andrey “Reynad” Yanyuk.
Fans and players will gather at San Francisco’s Folsom Street Foundry, with the tournament running from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT on Saturday, Oct. 10, and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. PT on Sunday, Oct. 11. Doors will open at 9:30 a.m., with free admission on a first-come, first-served basis. BlizzCon, developer Blizzard’s annual fan convention, will be held on Nov. 6-7 at the Anaheim Convention Center.
Attendees of the Americas Championship will walk away with a snazzy Power Core card back as a cosmetic upgrade usable in the game. For fans that can’t make it out to the Folsom Street Foundry, all of the games will also be broadcast on Blizzard’s official Hearthstone Twitch channel.
Hearthstone is Blizzard’s extremely popular digital take on collectible card games in the model established by Richard Garfield in the early ’90s with Magic: The Gathering. Two players construct decks of spells and creatures out of virtual cards earned in randomized packs, squaring off against one another to see who can whittle down the other’s health first. Mechanically it is essentially a lightweight Magic, couched in a slick interface, easy matchmaking, and the art and characters of Blizzard’s popular Warcraft universe.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.