Gaming League Announces Salaries, Draft

By Nick Mokey April 27, 2007

Gaming League Announces Salaries, Draft

The Championship Gaming Series, an international league for competitive gaming, demands to be taken seriously. The league announced Thursday that it will offer gamers $5 million in salaries and bonuses this year. It also announced that it will hold its first “draft” at the Playboy Mansion on June 12… so scratch that “taken seriously” part.

"This is the moment the gaming world has been waiting for," said CGS commissioner Andy Reif in a press release. “We will be paying salaries and bonuses to our players in excess of $5 million dollars during the 2007 season. The time has come for a new era of professional gaming as sports entertainment.”

We’re not sure that gaming fans have been anticipating the CGS anymore than football fans anticipated the ill-fated XFL, but we’ll give Reif the benefit of the doubt.

Online qualifiers for the draft will begin on April 28, with the first live event to be held May 11-12 in Los Angeles. Players who reach the draft will be split into six city-based teams of ten. PC gamers will compete in Counter-Strike: Source and FIFA 2007, while console gamers will compete in Dead or Alive 4 and Project Gotham Racing 3. Matches will be broadcast on DIRECTV.

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The first big gaming showcase of June is here, and it gave us a look at what's next for games made for the Meta Quest family of VR headsets. It was an important showcase too, as the Meta Quest Pro came out last year to very muted results, the idea of the metaverse is fading in its relevancy, and the Meta Quest 3 headset is going to release this fall. During this showcase, Meta tried t reaffirm why people should care about owning one of its VR headsets.

It did so mainly by revealing VR follow-ups to popular IP. Games like Samba de Amigo, The 7th Guest, and Bulletstorm are being remade in VR. Meanwhile, well-known IP like Stranger Things, Attack on Titan, and Assassin's Creed are also making the jump to virtual reality as well, and as sequel to Asgard's Wrath is in the works. A lot was revealed during the preshow and actual showcase, so rounded up everything that was revealed for you right here.

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The Lamplighters League is a pulp spy movie turned into a clever tactics game

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Key art highlighting Riot Forge's three League of Legends spinoffs in 2023.

Riot Forge, Riot Games' indie publisher focused on making League of Legends spinoffs with smaller teams, unveiled its 2023 lineup today. We learned about The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story, an action RPG from the developers of indie gem Moonlighter, for the first time, and Riot Games revealed more specific release windows for Convergence: A League of Legends Story and Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story.
The first of these games to release will be Digital Sun's The Mageseeker, which comes out this spring. The game focuses on League of Legends champion Sylas, revolutionary fighting back against the kingdom of Demacia for taking advantage of mages. We only see a little bit of gameplay in Riot Forge's 2023 lineup trailer, but it definitely looks somewhat similar to Moonlighter with its isometric action centered around Sylas' change and magical abilities.
Riot Forge Games 2023 | The Year Ahead Trailer
The next Riot Forge game to come out will be Double Stallion Games' Convergence sometime this summer. The game is a 2D platformer with time-based platforming and combat that follows Ekko, a character you'll recognize if you watched Arcane. Finally, Song of Nunu will launch this fall. It's a third-person adventure game from Tequila Works, a developer that's mastered that formula with titles like Rime and Gylt. It follows a young boy named Nunu and his yeti Willump as they search for Nunu's mother, so this game is bound to pack an emotional punch.
While only two games have come from Riot Forge so far, its catalog of games finally seems to be ramping up this year. The Mageseeker, Convergence, and Song of Nunu will all be released for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch over the course of 2023.