There’s been no shortage of happenings in esports this week, with everyone keeping busy as per usual. The highlights this week include Rocket League being included in the X Games, RFRSH gaining huge investment and agreeing with WESA compliance, and Minute Media’s esports effort DBLTAP officially launching.
Rocket League to feature in the X Games
Rocket League, the exciting esports title — involving flying cars and football — will form a part of this summer’s X Games, and in turn, will be broadcast on ESPN3.
The X Games partnership is in connection with FACEIT and features a prize pool of $75,000 (£57,734). The Rocket League part of the X Games will be on ESPN3 over July 14-16. This isn’t X Games’ first foray into esports; they worked with MLG for some Call of Duty and CS:GO in the past, but this fast paced, highly skilled rocket car based title definitely seems a better fit.
The X Games, which is split into the summer and winter editions, have been running since 1995 with participants competing for gold, silver and bronze medals in addition to money. Extreme sports including motox, skateboarding, snowboarding, wakeboarding more typically feature. Rocket League is set to join them.
Read the full article here.
RFRSH Entertainment raise €7.2m (£6.38m) in new funding and agrees to WESA multi-team ownership regulations
RFRSH Entertainment has announced it has raised €7.2m (£6.38m) in new funding from various sources. RFRSH are known in esports for backing Scandinavian CS:GO teams like Astralis, Heroic and GODSENT.
The group is set to use the new capital to further their position as a ‘leading esports media house and live entertainment producer’. RFRSH have moved fast since forming in December 2016, seeing their leading brand Astralis win the ELEAGUE Major trophy in January. The new financial backing is set to allow the company to work on their other brands and “a unique series of media content and live events”, which are to be announced later on in the year.
Additionally, and most definitely interestingly, WESA and RFRSH have announced that they will comply with WESA’s Multi-Team Ownership Regulations.
Under these rules, ownership or control of multiple esports organisations or teams that participate in Pro League is prohibited. For those unaware RFRSH is the Copenhagen based esports media company behind three sizable orgs in the form of Astralis, GODSENT and Heroic. This means that these teams will be able to take part in Pro League, and RFRSH will comply with this WESA ruling within the given 18 month time frame.
Read the investment article here.
Read the WESA article here.
Minute Media officially launches DBLTAP
Minute Media has officially unveiled its newest brand, esports platform DBLTAP.
DBLTAP, which has been in beta for a number of months, focuses on esports video and editorial content alongside tournament highlights. Most importantly it also boasts exclusive access thanks to its partnerships with ESL, ELEAGUE, DreamHack and Fnatic.
DBLTAP’s traffic has already reached in excess of three million monthly unique users and the site is currently curating and distributing more than 60 pieces of content each day. So far DBLTAP only has English language content but in the future it will expand beyond this.
As the company behind football focused 90min and US sports focused 12up, Minute Media now boasts a reach of more than 75 million unique users a month. It delivers over 25,000 pieces of original, socially-driven and then curated editorial in 11 languages to users in more than 200 countries.
Read the full article here.