The games graphics were stunning back in 2006 and have held up well. While Rise of Legends doesn’t deviate from this template completely, it still has a few neat ideas of its own, including a somewhat unique game-world setting where Steampunk style clockwork men will fight against magical creatures and dragons. Real time strategy games have come in their droves since Dune 2, but by and large they all stick to the same resource gathering/base building template laid down in Dune 2 all those years ago.
What they maybe didn’t realise was just how well they managed to nail the real time strategy formula on what was essentially their first go. When Westwood Studios released the seminal Dune 2 way back in 1992, they probably realised they were on to something big.
illustrationĪdditional reporting from ESPN The Magazine's Carl Carchia.Genre: Real Time Strategy Release Year: 2006 Developer: Big Huge Games Publisher: Microsoft Studios Age Rating: 12+ Playability Status: Perfect Tested On: Windows 10 圆4 Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable The prize pool has increased by more than 580 percent since 2012. These five, all members of team Newbee, totaled $5.03M for winning the 2014 Dota 2 title. MAMAS, DO let your babies grow up to be eGamers. PRESENTED WITHOUT comment: as an overall category, gaming has more YouTube followers than news, movies and education combined.
The League of Legends Championship sold out Staples Center in 2013, then sold out the 40,000-seat World Cup Stadium in Seoul a year later while drawing an online audience of 27 million - more than the TV viewership for the final round of the Masters. Today, eSports' biggest tournaments rival practically any sporting event. When Major League Gaming launched in the early 2000s, its tournaments played out in hotel ballrooms before. PEOPLE WATCH this thing? Well, in a word, yes. Just 28 percent are over 35-which, of course, is a selling point to advertisers looking to reach the next generation of consumers. One part of the stereotype does ring true, though: eSports fans do tend to be young.
In actuality, according to Newzoo, more than half of American eSports fans are employed full time, 44 percent are parents and, perhaps most surprising, 38 percent are women (another study puts it at 44 percent). THE GAMER STEREOTYPE? Young, single, male. Offering streams of games and tourneys and access to gaming's stars, it's also where the next generation of would-be gamers post their own streams. TWITCH, a video-streaming site that boasts 55 million users, is arguably the most important contributor to eSports' recent growth. (They're coming for you next, Indonesia!) And while eSports have long been biggest in Asia, especially gaming-mad Korea, North America and Europe now claim 28 million eSports fans and the number is growing by 21 percent a year. SO HOW BIG is this gaming thing? Let's start with this: Some 205 million people watched or played eSports in 2014, according to market research firm Newzoo - meaning that if the eSports nation were actually a nation, it would be the fifth largest in the world. So can it ever be a sport? Does it matter? eSports are here. Gaming is what every traditional sports league is desperate to become: young, global, digital and increasingly diverse. Coke and Nissan have joined Logitech and Red Bull as tournament sponsors.
But enough of all that! More than 20 years after the first video game tournaments, top eSports tourneys now draw audiences that rival the biggest traditional sporting events popular midweek live streams routinely attract more than 100,000 online viewers. It's eSports-and the "athletes" are headset-wearing, energy-drink-guzzling gamers. Then comes the incredulous reveal: This isn't basketball or boxing or even billiards. Zoom in on the contestants, sweating from the intensity of the competition. THERE'S A FORMULA for stories like this one: Open with a stadium full of screaming fans. This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's June 22 eSports Issue.