Twitter is opening a new front in its battle to become a live-streaming destination. On Thursday, the social platform announced a new deal with, ESL, the world’s largest eSports company, that will include a total of 1,500 hours of live broadcasts from over 15 events.
The competitive gaming coverage will include the ESL One, Intel Extreme Masters (IEM), and DreamHack circuits. The broadcasts will be kicked off this Saturday with IEM Katowice and its Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Starcraft II tournaments.
The live-streams will be available globally to both logged-in and logged-out users via dedicated ESL, IEM, and DreamHack live URLs. Additionally, ESL is also going to produce an original weekly highlights show for the platform, complete with behind-the-scenes footage from the events.
“Esports fans are endemic to digital and this partnership with Twitter expands ESL’s reach for all of our major tournaments for fans around the globe,” said ESL social media and editorial vice president Johannes Schiefer. “Intel Extreme Masters Katowice is our most anticipated live event, and we are excited to bring premier content from this tournament and beyond to more fans in a premium experience.”
Last summer, Twitter teamed up with Turner’s eLeague to live-stream its Counter-Strike: Global Offensive semifinals and championship. The ESL deal is a major coup for the company, which faces stiff competition from Facebook — the social network is currently hosting live coverage of Blizzard’s Heroes of the Dorm competition.
Twitter began tapping into its gaming community last year with the launch of its official gaming account. Described as the site’s dedicated gaming hub, the arrival of Twitter Gaming was welcomed by ESL in the form of a tweet.
Over a year later, the company’s COO Anthony Noto now claims the platform is back bigger and better than ever when it comes to eSports. “We see this collaboration as a way to tap into the engaged audience of gamers that are already using Twitter as a primary source of content,” said Noto. “By partnering with the leading eSports companies like ESL and DreamHack, we look forward to bringing the best of eSports live video and conversation together on Twitter.”
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
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.