With positive reviews coming in for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and its Blackout battle royale mode, the Call of Duty Endowment locked in its date for this year’s edition of The Race charity stream. The annual event will take place on Oct. 11 with Twitch personalities GoldGlove, VernNotice, JERICHO and HUTCH leading this year’s charity stream, looking to race to be the first account to hit max prestige in the title’s multiplayer mode.
Nintendo is going back to school to promote the upcoming Super Smash Bros. Ultimate game, launching a promotional tour to join university tailgate parties this college football season. The activation will be part of the Wendy’s College Tailgate Tour, letting fans play the game before its release in December. The setup will feature a customized Super Smash Bros. Ultimate branded trailer with six gameplay stations and a large LED screen in dedicated tailgate areas outside of major college stadiums so fans can gather, play and cheer each other on as they “compete in epic battles featuring their favorite video game characters – and maybe even emerge victorious against their own real-life rivals.” The action begins on Sept. 22 at the Stanford/Oregon game.
Ruffles, the official chip of the NBA, is taking its activation to the new NBA 2K19 game, announcing plans to introduce The RIDGE on the live Game Mode. Starting Sept. 30, players will be able to shoot for a first-of-its-kind 4-point line. The activation marks one of the first brands to activate a game-changing element into a professional sports league video game. Fans can further enhance their NBA 2K experience by purchasing specially marked bags of Ruffles containing codes to unlock a virtual currency multiplier for the Ruffle Ridge Challenge and a chance to win prizes such as gaming consoles, TV and home-theater systems and copies of NBA 2K19.
Bud Light Canada is backing a new esports series featuring Bil Carter, Michele Morrow and content producer GiantWaffle. The series is titled Game Over and will debut on Thursday at 9p on the brand’s Twitch channel, offering “the best esports plays, fails, snipes, and clutches” from around the world of esports.
Following the NA LCS Summer Playoff Finals this past weekend in Oakland, FanAI was interested in seeing if any of the title sponsors showed an increase in their brand awareness with esports fans. To investigate the social follower ROI, FanAI compared four top QSR sandwich brand’s esports follower percentages from June 2018, when the Jersey Mike’s NALCS sponsorship was announced, and the end of the NALCS Finals weekend. There was expected growth shown across the board, however Jersey Mike’s following grew at 1.2x – 1.7x the rate of the other brands. This indicates that the growth was driven by an outside factor, perhaps this factor was their sponsorship of the NALCS.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds became the first game in Steam history to top the million player mark for an entire year. PCGamesN first spotted the achievement, noting that PUBG first broke the million players on Sept. 8, 2017 when 1,028,275 people played the game over the course of a 24-hour period.
Esports Charts reported on August’s most viewed esports events around the world, this year led by Chinese esports league LPL Summer, which nabbed peak viewership of 67.8 million viewers on Aug. 19. Discounting Chinese audiences, however, the month saw The International command the top spot, where it drew nearly 1.2 million peak viewers on Aug. 26. That was followed by Fortnite Summer Skirmish Week 4 with 527,721 peak viewership on Aug. 3, the Call of Duty World League Championship on Aug. 19 with 324,433, LCK Summer at 287,639 on Aug. 1 and the NA LCS Summer on Aug. 26 with 279,233.
A new report from Newzoo states that games will account for 76% of a projected $92.1 billion in mobile app revenue in 2018. Overall, global mobile gaming revenue will approach nearly $70 billion this year, up from $42.5 billion in 2016 and projected to hit $106.4 billion in 2021.
Nintendo is poised to announce the start date for its online service today with Sept. 18 posed as the start date. A one-week trial will be offered on that date, according to Polygon, available through the Nintendo Switch eShop, with 20 games available at launch.
GINX Esports TV named Caleb Fox as its SVP of global multiplatform development. Fox was most recently a former Business Development consultant for Games and Esports at Microsoft in addition to serving as Head of Esports at Wargaming America. “We set out to find a needle in a haystack: an executive with multiplatform content experience, who was also a digital native as well as an esports insider,” said Michiel Bakker, Ginx TV CEO. “Following an extensive search process, we found our man in Caleb. He is ideally placed to help GINX Esports TV scale up our community-focused digital presence and to create more touchpoints for our brand. He already has made an impact at GINX TV and I look forward to working with him to bring new digital products to our community.”
Canadian Olympic Committee CEO Chris Overholt is stepping down after eight years at the organization to join the expansion Overwatch League franchise based in Toronto. The Toronto spot is among eight reported expansion teams for Season Two of the league, owned by a group led by Canadian entrepreneur Michael Kimel and operated by esports organization Splyce.
