Good Morning and welcome to another Tuesday Telecast on this fine Spring Day! We are excited to be finalizing the details on our Grand Opening Weekend this week and should have more news by next week. As for events this week, as usual we continue with our online locals of Smash Bros Thursday night, Rocket League Friday night, and Warzone at 3pm on Saturday. For the past 4 months or so we’ve been hosting these online events simply as a way to engage with our community and to provide some sort of gaming competition while we wait for the club to open. Obviously transitioning to online is something that goes against the whole idea of our club but since video games can be played online, it wasn’t too difficult of a decision. We can’t wait to start hosting casual play and in-person tournaments and events like we originally envisioned. The atmosphere at DMGC is going to be awesome and it will be great to finally have a place in Des Moines where gamers can go to a LAN setup and be able to compete regularly.
We really appreciate everyone who has participated in the online events and we just ran the numbers, we have given away over $500 in cash prizes in just the few months we’ve been doing these online events. After hearing that, it goes without saying that there is some serious opportunity to not only compete, but win money playing the games you love. There will be even more events and prize money may even go up once we open up the club. Remember, when we open in person, anyone who is not 18 will not be eligible to win cash prizes but instead will receive other prizes such as a t-shirt, a DMGC pin, or some other equipment.
We likely will still have some online events everywhere now and then, especially for fans of ours that don’t live in central Iowa. These online events will likely be battle royale games since battle royale’s aren’t truly a level playing field anyways. Also battle royale games can have a lot more people in a single match so to start since we only have 10 gaming PCs, we couldn’t get enough people to play a Warzone match even if we wanted to in person. Of course, we hope to add more PCs as soon as financially possible and thankfully we already have in the works a plan to add some more through one of our soon to be announced partners.
That does it for an update on the business side of things, now for a little bit of esports industry news! In Call of Duty, a very cool thing was recently added to Warzone where now in front of Stadium is a statue of the CDL trophy and on the actual stadium itself are banners of each of the players on the Champions from last year, the Dallas Empire. Of course two of those players have switched to other teams now but it is really cool to have those players actually in the game for everyone to see. They are Crimsix, Clayster, Shotzzy, Huke, and Illey. Also, the Third Major tournament of the year is coming up this weekend so be sure to watch all the action starting Thursday on YouTube.
In Overwatch, the Dallas Fuel have been making headlines in more ways than one. They finally won their first trophy after taking home 1st place in the May Melee and then the next day they announced the signing of legendary DPS player Pine who came out of retirement to join them.
Finally, Nick Farrel with Dexerto esports has put out a list of the current top players in competitive Fortnite. The list includes 20 players but the top five in his mind are: Jannisz, EpicWhale, Jahq, chapix, and Stretch. More famous players like BenjyFishy and Bugha can be found further down the list but this points to the ever changing meta of Fortnite and how there are always younger players challenging at the very top.
That’l do it for this morning’s telecast. Thanks so much for watching and have a great day!