We’ve been covering the International DOTA 2 Championships since they announced the prize pool for the event. Initially, Valve, the makers of DOTA 2, put up $1.6 million of their own money for the event and gamers have contributed to the prize pool for the event through the purchasing of the Dota 2 International Championships Compendium. DOTA 2 is a MOBA game (Massively Online Battle Arena) much like League of Legends, which is one of the more popular of the two and is made by Riot Games. DOTA 2 has only officially been out for a year or so (but has been in beta since 2011), but the momentum of the game is picking up even faster than anyone had suspected and is likely trying to compete with Riot Games for their user base.

However, Riot games funds their World Championships and last year’s season which was from a pool of $2 million, with the first place team splitting the $1 million prize. Similarly, Last year’s International DOTA 2 Championship was around $3 million ($2.8 million) with half of the prize going to the winning team, Team Alliance. This year’s $10 million prize so far eclipses both of those figures that it has now propelled eSports into the level of incredibly real sporting competitions. Many comparisons have been drawn with the FedEx cup which is the highest paying sporting event in Golf and actually eclipses any other horse racing event in the world and many other sports including Cricket, Rugby and virtually any other sport that isn’t Soccer or American Football. Obviously figures change from year to year, but at $10 million and counting there’s a good chance that a lot of people are going to want to switch to play DOTA 2 instead of League of Legends.

After all, the $10 million is split among the top 8 teams that compete, which means that there’s still a ton of money being played for even if you don’t finish in the top 4 where the real money can be had. Looking at the DOTA 2 split from last year, the top team gets 50 percent and the rest of the teams split the remainder. The 2nd place team gets 22 percent, 3rd place team gets 10 percent, 4th place team gets 7 percent, 5th and 6th get 4 percent and 7th and 8th get 1.5 percent. That means, if Valve continues with these percentages for the $10 million pool this year, 1st place will get over $5 million. That means that each and every member of the team walks away with $1 million and immediately become millionaires. Sure, there are coaches and other costs, but in the end there’s $1 million per player being awarded which can’t be said about most sports, team or not. Being able to become a millionaire in a Team eSport is mind boggling on its own.

DOTA 2 International Championships Prize Pool split via Alliance Gaming

Now, if you take the same percentages from last year and apply them to this year,  2nd’s place stands to win $2.2 million (over $400k per player), 3rd place stands to win $1 million (over $200k per player), 4th place stands to win $700,000 (over $100K per player) and 5th and 6th places each take home $400,000 (over $90K per player). Last (and least) the 7th and 8th place teams would likely take home $150,000 which still comes out to $30,000 per player which is nearly what the entire team got for winning last year in the same place. The sheer size of this tournament is really starting to weigh on me now.

Now, if we compare those numbers to last year’s League of Legends final, we will see why there’s a good chance that a lot of people will soon consider switching to DOTA 2 (unless Riot Games significantly ups the prize pool). Mainly that the 3rd place DOTA 2 team will earn as much money as the 1st place team did in League of Legends’ final.

League of Legends 2013 final split, source: Curse Gaming

Based on the above numbers, the winners of this year’s DOTA 2 International Championships will actually walk away with more money individually than the entire team of SK Telecom T1 did last year. Additionally, 2nd place players in DOTA 2’s Championships will walk away with more money than the entire 2nd place team did in the League of Legends finals ($400K vs $250K). The numbers just continually get more and more drastic with the 4th place team in DOTA 2’s Championships walking away with almost as much per player as the entire 3rd and 4th place teams did in the League of Legends final.

This means that the stakes are higher than they have ever been and Valve has found a way to make their game more competitive with Riot’s League of Legends, by simply allowing the community to incentivize the game’s growth. $8.4 million out of the current $10 million was added to the prize pool by the community, so they clearly want to see DOTA 2 succeed and by the looks of it, this is going to be one of the most talked about eSports events, ever. I even remember when I first heard about League of Legends $1 million prize for their final and how big of a deal that was. Now we’re looking at $10 million which is no chump change, and likely explains why universities are handing out eSports scholarships, even though right now they’re only for League of Legends (not sure how long that’ll only be League of Legends now that DOTA 2 has a $10 million pool).

The post DOTA 2 Tourney Breaks $10 Mil, Biggest eSports Event Ever? appeared first on VR World.

Robert Morris University-Illinois, a small private university in Chicago, will offer eSports scholarships later this year. Beginning this fall, the scholarships will cover up to 50 percent of tuition and room and board; which is worth up to $19,000 per student. This is the first substantial scholarship of its kind in the U.S. The school plans on offering 45-50 athletic scholarships to competitive League of Legends gamers.

League of Legends has 70 million players per month and in terms of hours played, it was the most popular video game in the U.S. and Europe in 2012.

RMU is also looking into hiring a coach for its team. League of Legends is a highly competitive game that requires a lot of teamwork, strategy, and skill.

A competitive college league already exists in the form of the Collegiate Star League dedicated to video gaming. The CSL is comprised of teams at 100 universities such as MIT and UC Berkeley. Most teams exist as clubs or informal groups at their respective schools. The RMU Eagles will be an official team in this league.

Source: NPR

The post Robert Morris University-Illinois to Offer League of Legends eSports Scholarships appeared first on VR World.

At Computex 2014, Kingston had a lot of products to show attendees at their HyperX suite which also featured Kingston’s HOT (HyperX OC Takeover) where overclockers competed for a share of $10,000 in prize money. The rest of the floor was shared by Kingston’s various new products, some never seen before, and others updated since CES. The main stage was where Kingston would show off these products as well as host their League of Legends competition.

The HyperX Main Stage

We got a private tour of all of the products that Kingston currently has to offer, including the lowdown on how the company is rebranding their HyperX line of products to be more consistent and simple. In fact, some of their product names won’t change at all, while others will change just for the sake of consistency. Those lines will start with Fury at the baseline for HyperX, then be followed by Savage in the middle and Predator at the top. This will be reflected across all of Kingston’s HyperX memory and storage products and should make understanding the expected level of performance quite easy for consumers. They will do away with the Gensis line of HyperX products and will brand their SODIMM line of HyperX memory as Impact, unrelated to the other naming schemes.

The first product we were introduced to was actually an update to their recently announced gaming headset, the HyperX Cloud Pro Gaming headset which is the company’s update to the original, offering a white color in addition to black. Otherwise, nothing really drastic.

After that, we took a look at their new HyperX Fury 240GB SSD. This SSD is part of the company’s entry line of HyperX gaming SSDs and features a SandForce 2281 controller. The expected read/write speeds are about 500/500 MB/s and uses a standard SATA 6Gb/s connector and uses locked synchronous NAND. It will come in 120 and 240GB capacities.

Hyper X Fury 240 GB SSD

After that, we got to take a look at Kingston’s new MobileLite Wireless G2 (Gen 2) which is designed to vastly improve upon the original version. It now has a whopping 4640 mAh battery for extended battery life as well as a network port to allow you to use the device as a router. I have personally been hoping for such a device because my laptop doesn’t have a wired port on it and the MobileLite gives me the ability to get near to wired connection speeds without a wired port. It also has a USB port and memory card slot for sharing the media like the previous MobileLite did and charges via MicroUSB. The router functionality for 3G dongles, unfortunately is only available in Asia, but may eventually reach the US. Kingston’s demo showed the MobileLite Wireless G2 playing content off their also newly announced DataTraveler MicroDuo 3.0 USB onto the tablets next to it.

After that, we got a chance to see their new Phison-based M.2 SATA SSD which is a 22×80 mm SSD and is rated for a 555/520 sequential read/write performance. But they also had other benchmarks running so that we could see things like CrystalDiskMark and others as well.

After Kingston’s Phison-based M.2 SSD, we took a look at their HyperX Predator SSD, this drive is rated for speeds up to 1.8 GB/s sequential read. Obviously there are going to be a lot of companies out with these kinds of PCIe SSDs with SanForce SF-3000 series controllers fairly soon, so it will be important to evaluate who’s got the fastest drive and what kind of performance it really has. As you can see below, Kingston’s HyperX Predator PCIe SSD will be offered in capacities up to 2TB.

They also showed us their Marvell based M.2 SSD, which is their more high-end drive, capable of astonishing speeds of up to 1.3 GB/s. These drives will come in capacities up to 512GB and will sport 16nm NAND. Because of the PCIe controller from Marvell, this M.2 drive is capable of astonishing speeds, more than double the other M.2 drive that Kingston currently offers.

After seeing that drive in action, we got to check out Kingston’s new V310 SSD, which is a 960 GB SSD capable of delivering fairly high performance using a Phison 3108 controller that still delivers a pretty good level of performance with sequential reads over 500 MB/s and writes of 485 MB/s as seen in the CrystalDiskMark below.

Below, we will have a full gallery of all of the products that Kingston showed, including new and old products. Some of those products include their already announced, but never shown Fury RAM as well as their DDR4 desktop and server modules, still currently under development.

The post Kingston's Newest Products Shown at Computex 2014 appeared first on VR World.

Today, the day before Computex 2014 officially starts, Nvidia held their very first Gamer’s Day across the street from Taipei’s famous Taipei 101 at ATT 4 Fun’s 7th floor Show Box. The company had trucks driving around the area making the public and Computex attendees alike aware of the all-day festivities which started at 11 am and went til 7 pm.

While we didn’t get a chance to stay for the whole event, we did spend quite a bit of time walking around the venue and watching the festivities unfold, mostly in Mandarin. The focal point of the event was the professional League of Legends tournament being held on the main stage with commentators and $10,000 USD prize. There were also a series of amateur gamers playing League of Legends on separate machines. All of the gaming machines for the day with the exception of the three 4K gaming display were powered by MSI and their logo was plastered all over the event.

The Gamer’s Day also had a series of giveaways that would go on over the course of the day and included Nvidia-powered devices like a Gigabyte Tegra Note 7 as well as Nvidia SHIELDs. The last and ultimate giveaway for the day, at the end, was one GeForce GTX Titan Z. To do the math, this card is $3,000 USD and would come out to about 90,000 NTD (New Taiwanese Dollars), an even more daunting sounding price. According to Nvidia’s figures, they had around 1,500 people pre-register for the all day Gamer’s Day event. While we didn’t get any exact figures of how many people attended Nvidia’s Gamer’s Day, I can say with absolute certainty that their numbers were well into the high hundreds as people came and went over the course of the day.

Nvidia was also showing off a multitude of new G-Sync monitors from their partners including Acer’s 4K G-Sync monitor, ASUS’ 2560×1440 G-Sync monitor as well as G-Sync monitors from AOC and Phillips.

Nvidia chose to do a Gamer’s Day instead of having a booth on the show floor this year and it isn’t going to be the last time they do it either. Because at E3, Nvidia has already announced similar plans to forego a booth on the show floor and to build a Gamer’s Day-like experience outside of the convention center in order to make themselves more accessible to the public and local gamers. Nvidia is still going to have to pay the convention organizers at both events in order to do what they’re doing, but it alos

The post Nvidia Throws Gamer's Day at Computex 2014 appeared first on VR World.

The DOTA 2 International competition has already begun in the regional competitions and the final will be in July from the 18th and 21st in Seattle’s KeyArena. However, in order to fund the competition, Valve has decided to encourage the community to purchase compendiums for $9.99 which will allow them to increase the prize pool by $2.50. The International Compendium is a digital booklet that allows gamers to interact with the DOTA 2 tournament. DOTA 2 players will also earn more rewards as they are able to level up their Compendium by watching games, collecting player cards and making tournament predictions

The awesome thing about Valve’s model is that with the Compendium, they are encouraging DOTA 2 players to buy the Compendium because of the vast amount of additional rewards that they are enabling with each mark they hit trying to raise the prize value of the International competition going down in July. The stretch goals started at $1.8 million and has reached $5 million, meaning that at least a million gamers (out of 8 million active gamers) have bought the DOTA 2 International Compendium. So far, gamers have gained 11 new bonus items in addition to what the Compendium had originally offered and there are only two more stretch goals left, at which point they will have raised $6 million for the DOTA 2 Internationl competition.

By buying this Compendium and encouraging gamers to participate more with the Compendium Valve may actually be able to show the world how powerful their community (and game) really can be. And they may be able to get 1 million concurrent viewers to watch a single event which may show the world how serious eSports has gotten, if League of Legends hasn’t already done that with their competitions. However, based on the current $5 million purse, there is already going to be a LOT of attention bring drawn towards DOTA 2. After all, how many people are going to want to play a technically free game where you can compete for a share of a $5 million prize.

Keep in mind that last year the prize pool for the 2013 DOTA 2 International competition was $2,874,380, which is already quite sizable. But this year the DOTA 2 community have outdone themselves and are on pace to double it this year.

Last year’s split went like this according to PC Gamer:

1st – $1,363,988
2nd – $600,155
3rd – $272,798
4th – $190,958
5th – $109,119
6th – $109,119
7th – $40,920
8th – $40,920

Based on these numbers, and the fact that the current prize pool is nearly double the previous one from last year we can expect that 1st place will likely walk away with something like $2.5 million while second will walk away with something around $1.2 million and 3rd place with around $500,000. This is going to be a pretty big competition with incredibly high stakes and it will be very interesting to see how much attention it gets outside of the core DOTA 2 community, which currently is about 8 million strong.

The post DOTA 2 International Final Pool Hits $5 Milllion appeared first on VR World.