Gaming
Overwatch League Players Will Make At Least $50,000 A Year With Benefits
Following the announcement of the founding seven teams of the Overwatch League, Blizzard has released a statement regarding the players who will make up the league. The statement covered player salaries, contracts, benefits, and bonuses.
Technically, all 30 million Overwatch players of eligible age are considered free agents. Teams are obviously not going to be scouting platinum matches, but still. If you own a copy of Overwatch, you can potentially be signed by a team as a Free Agent.
Players on Overwatch teams, even those in the League (NRG, Immortals, Misfits), are not automatically signed to the team. Players are only considered a member of the Overwatch League when they sign a Player Agreement with their team. So, there are no contracted players yet. Even members of announced teams are not officially a part of the team, even if they have a contract with the organization.
The player signing window will be open from August 1 to October 30. This signing process is unique to Season 1, according to Blizzard, as it will be updated for next year’s preseason to reflect “the needs of an established league, its teams, players, and fans.”
To get to what players will be looking for, the league announced generous terms for contracted talent. Every player will sign a one-year contract, with an option for another year. Blizzard did not clarify if this is a team or player option. The league minimum is $50,000 per year, and players will be provided with health insurance and a savings plan. On top of their base pay, teams are required to distribute 50% of all winnings from playoffs and League events to their players. This is quite a hefty bonus, as bonuses available from Season 1 total $3.5 million. Winning the League championship alone grants a $1 million bonus, so $500,000 distributed between the amount of players.
Speaking of which, Blizzard also announced team requirements for team size, housing, and region locking. A roster must have at least 6 players (obviously), but there can be no more than 12. Teams are required to provide housing and practice facilities during the season, and each facility must meet League standards. Furthermore, there is no region locking “in terms of the place of birth or home country of any player.”
The perks of being a League player are clearly evident, so players will be vying for the spots available on the 7 teams. The downside of all this is with the advent of the League, many teams fans are familiar with will be breaking apart, especially those not in the League. Expect many poaching offers to pick up players on teams that have yet to buy in, particularly ones that didn’t perform well in Contenders Season 1.
The lack of region locking is a huge announcement, as players from North America and Europe now have to contend for spots with their Korean counterparts, who have shown (in tournaments like APEX) their skill level is demonstrably better. The fact that each team will basically be able to sign two teams (up to 12 players) will alleviate some of those worries, as there will definitely be room on teams for players who show their skill.
The Overwatch League Launches later this year. Read the full announcement here!
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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