21st Aug2011

The First Winners of the Dota 2 Championship

by Skibs

Valve Software’s new Defense Of The Ancients game made its international debut this week at GamesCom, in the German city of  Cologne. The stakes of the competition were raised once Valve announced the 1  million dollar grand prize- the highest ever in e-sports’ short history.

Sixteen teams from around the world competed, all picked from their reputated prowess with the original Dota. In the end, EHOME (China) squared off against Na’Vi (Ukraine) in a best-of-five match, leaving Na’Vi victorious.

Considering the popular Dota-clone League of Legends has announced a 5 million dollar prize pool for its second season, it will be interesting to see how the e-sports movement reacts to its increased financial success and  international recognition.

05th Aug2011

QuakeCon 2011: John Carmack’s Keynote and Q&A

by Skibs

This year’s Carmack-Talk focused on the id software’s upcoming title RAGE. Carmack’s initial talk comes off much like a post-mortem for the soon-to-be-released FPS, commenting on the triumphs and difficulties of creating the ambitious cross-platform title. Of note is Carmack’s recent conversion to static code analysis software, his experimentation with PC-Lint and  Visual Studio’s Analyzer.

Keynote Speech:

Keynote Q&A: