Dad was wrong: playing Minecraft actually can land you a scholarship. At least, it can if you’re really, really good at it.
Five gamers aged 10 to 14 will now split a $15,000 scholarship, Engadget is reporting, after having proven themselves best in the nation during the four-week Super League Gaming Minecraft competition. The competitions take place in movie theaters across the U.S. and Canada. Team and individual points are recorded every week from competitors in 68 cities.
The winning team, which is based in Maryland and calls itself Live2Craft, beat out 450 other teams to claim the $15,000 scholarship. Split between five members, each gamer now has $3,000 in their college fund.
There are no prizes for the runner-up teams, although there was an individual prize. 10-year-old Julien Wiltshire, from California, won a $5,000 scholarship for having the highest individual scores. It’s the second time he’s won that prize, meaning he’s got a decent chunk of money ready for college at this point. Let’s hope he finds time to study.
The third season of this competition starts on April 30, and if the previous two competitions are any indication, more gamers than every will join this time around.
Despite a graphic style that looked outdated even in 2011, Minecraft continues to be the primary obsession for millions of young gamers. The central mechanic of building anything you want with 3D cubes surely has Lego kicking themselves to this day. Minecraft was sold to Microsoft in a deal worth $2.5 billion back in 2014.
Minecraft has been the main focus of Super League Gaming thus far, but the official website says there are plans for other games. There are also plans to expand to more cities, and potentially internationally.
Your kid probably won’t win a scholarship, even if she does sign up, but is playing Minecraft any more of a waste of time than watching television? Norms are going to keep evolving on this, and the chance of winning scholarships could be a part of that ongoing transition.
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.