It’s the start of March, almost a year has passed since Dota 2 lost it’s long held top spot as the most played game on Valve’s platform Steam. Last night the statistics were out and Dota 2 passed 1.000.000 concurrent players for the first time since February 2017. and overtook Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds as the game with most active players. Dota 2 player numbers are increasing ever so slightly.

Nobody can say for sure what this means for Dota 2 as it’s been quite some time since it was the most contested game on Steam but Valve’s giant looks to be making a steady comeback. Frequent game play updates coupled with the fact Dota 2 is releasing more and more new heroes and game play mechanics looks to be one of the core elements behind this comeback to the top.

Original article can be found at Gaming4.Cash

Cloud9 has signed automotive maker BMW to a sponsorship deal, the team announced via Twitter on Friday.

The deal marks the automaker’s first team sponsorship to date. BMW previously did a single-event sponsorship for the 2017 EU League of Legends (LoL) Championship Series Summer Finals in Paris. For that event, BMW produced a series of videos with Unicorns of Love.

Cloud9 revealed the partnership with an image showing six organization employees and players—including CEO Jack Etienne, as well as a cosplay-wearing Zachary “Sneaky” Scuderi from its LoL team—posing in front of a BMW car along with the phrase, “It’s character that drives performance.” In a subsequent tweet, Etienne said that Cloud9 had just shot a series of commercials for BMW.

March 8 is International Women’s Day and to celebrate The Esports Observer is recognizing some of the amazing women working and serving in prominent leadership roles within the esports industry. For the next five days, we will be sharing valuable stories and insights from a diverse group of movers and shakers—from how their esports journeys began to different ways women can join and thrive in this burgeoning industry.

According to a report from Esports Observer, the China Internet Association held a Digital Esports and Intelligent Economy summit in Beijing on March 2. The China Internet Association stated their intention to start the Esports Work Council during the event. Having additional standards in place in China could serve to protect players and further standardize the industry in the country through regulations. This could also lead to potential visa benefits for athletes traveling to and from the country to compete, which has been an issue for Chinese players in the past.

“The esports industry has grown in a certain scale and level, it already has sort of a strong economic effect,” Song Maoen, Vice Secretary of the China Internet Association said.

The summit, according to ESO’s report, had the support of several Chinese government departments, including the Chinese Propaganda Dept, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the General Administration of Sport of China.

AT&T has closed its first esports team sponsorship, coming to terms with Cloud9 on a deal that includes presenting rights to “The Nines,” a new weekly digital video series about the organization’s 12 teams in 10 games.

The Nines’s holistic approach to the entire Cloud9 organization will be a shift in content strategy, which to this point mostly focuses on particular teams. The new format will facilitate crossover fandom from one game to other Cloud9 teams, executives hope, and also allow AT&T to market to an aggregated fan base.

Cloud9 had 17.4M social followers across its various channels.

“We don’t have a single place where you can just go find out what’s happening in the Cloud9 universe in one spot, and I think that’s what’s unique about what we’re building here,” said co-founder and CEO Jack Etienne.

This has finally happened now – Super League, an organization founded in 2014 is now trading at Wall Street. Unlike most esports companies, SL made the decision to focus on regular players and their interests rather than prospective pro players. The company’s CEO Ann Hand has referred to her company as the ‘Little League for esports’.

Not so little, of course – the company reported sales exceeding $1 million last year. Among their activities are in-person amateur competitions, streams on Twitch and YouTube and more. Their first day at Wall Street was Tuesday, and truth be told, it didn’t go very well. As soon as trading started, the shares tumbled down an unpleasant 24%, and stayed around the $8.50 mark.

Astralis have picked up their third Major title after winning IEM Katowice 2019 with a convincing 2-0 success over ENCE.

If there were any remaining doubts about Astralis‘ credentials, about their position as the most dominant side in the modern Counter-Strike, they surely were dispelled on Sunday. The match was always likely to be David versus Goliath; ENCE, a first-timer at Majors, going up against Astralis, a team looking for their third crown. The Finnish squad had already proved that dreams do come true, beating Liquid and Natus Vincere with some miraculous comebacks, but the Danes proved to be a tall order for Aleksi “Aleksib” Virolainen‘s troops.