Riot Games announced first details and tentative plans for Valorant esports in 2025 on Tuesday. The 2025 Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) season officially begins in January with more teams, an expanded format, and a revamped calendar that runs into October. Highlights include 12-team regional leagues, a revamped Championship Points system, and an extended season that ends in October. Starting in January 2025, the global ecosystem for Valorant esports will include  2 teams across each regional league—EMEA, Pacific, CN, and Americas...

France-based esports organization Team Vitality and blockchain platform Tezos commemorate their ongoing two-year partnership this week by launching an updated version of the fan engagement mobile app, V.Hive. The new version of the app, being called "V.Hive 2.0," offers new features and a cleaner design, according to a release.  Team Vitality claims that the app has been downloaded more than 100K times on various mobile platforms, currently has 75K active accounts with around 35k connected wallets, and more than 100k...

ESL FACEIT Group announced Thursday that it has named ergonomic chair maker Anthros as the official chair partner for a number of its gaming tournament and festival events. Financial terms of this new deal were not disclosed, but the partnership will run from 2005 - 2027, according to the announcement. Under the terms of this new deal, Anthros will provide its ergonomic chair line to attendees, players, creators, and staff during several live events across EFG's circuits and festivals including...

The International Esports Federation (IESF) announced Thursday that its annual event, the IESF World Esports Summit is on track and will take place in December in Busan, South Korea. The annual conference will be hosted at the Busan Esports Arena (BRENA) from Dec. 5-6, with the goal of bringing together "prominent figures from esports, global brands, government officials, and sports executives," for a series of talks and panels on the state of the industry. The event will feature a number...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday, targeting Microsoft's recent series of post-merger layoffs, as first reported by Bloomberg. In its filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, the FTC argued that Microsoft’s plans to cut approximately 1,900 jobs from its various video game divisions—including companies and divisions within Activision Blizzard, which it acquired in October 2023 for around $67.8B USD—contradicted statements made in court that it...

Streaming analytics firm Stream Hatchet released key details from its latest report, Live-Streaming Trends Report for Q3 2024. General and broad key takeaways from the report, based on the data collected across multiple commercial, global streaming platforms include the following: Overall live-streaming during the quarter (tracked across 19 platforms) saw consolidated viewership of 8.5B hours watched—912M, or 12% more than Q3 2023. Much of this growth came from platforms such as Kick, which saw its viewership double compared to the...

With the conclusion of the BLAST R6 2024 season (at Montreal Major won by Brazilian esports organization w7m Esports), the league revealed some details on what the ecosystem under its ongoing partnership with tournament organizer BLAST for Rainbow Six Siege esports will look like in 2025. The next season will kick off in May 2025 with a LAN Kick-off event called Reload, tentatively set to take place in Brazil. Reload will be followed by two stages of regional leagues, then...

Corsair-owned gaming peripherals division SCUF Gaming announced this week that it has signed a multi-year partnership with Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Under the terms of this new multi-year partnership, both organizations will work on a number of initiatives, including SCUF Gaming being promoted as the official controller of Oracle Red Bull Racing and Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing, a range of Oracle Red Bull Racing licensed controllers, the promotion of the...

Following the conclusion of the International Esports Federation's annual competition—World Esports Championship (WEC24)—in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the organization held its ordinary general meeting and announced the appointment of several new board members and committee members. The IESF held its 16th Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) on Nov. 18, hosting over 150 delegates from member federations around the world. At the meeting the IESF membership elected  Samart Benjamin Assarasakorn as a board member; Daniel Wen Jun Loy as treasurer; Soufiane El Filali...

Riot Games announced that it is making changes to its ERLs (European Regional Leagues) system for League of Legends Esports in 2025. At a glance, those new changes will include allowing more flexibility for tournament organizers, relaxed rules on broadcasting, no more mandatory substitute rules for players/teams, an option for tournament organizers to increase the number of locally trained representatives (LTRs), laxer rules on players who want to compete in third-party events, in-person event rules, and changes to division 2...