Is this the most virus-proof job in the world?

Ben Lupo sat in his basement in Omaha, Nebraska, one recent afternoon, trying to kill a brigade of heavily armed Russians before they killed him.

“I’m getting shot at already, dog,” he said into a headset, as the sound of machine guns echoed in the air. “So, this is not cool.”

Moments later, the Russians had cornered and finished him off — also not cool. It was a grisly end to an ill-fated campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a first-person shooter video game set in the fictional country of Urzikstan.

Lupo did not stew over his demise. He didn’t have time. About 13,000 people were watching him live on Twitch, the streaming platform where hordes of fans can pay to follow the best online gamers in the business. Few attract bigger crowds than Lupo, and since the coronavirus began forcing people to shelter in place, his crowds have only grown. He estimates that his viewership is up 25 percent to 30 percent.

“I feel,” he said in an interview, “like I’ve been preparing for this moment my whole life.”


It’s hard to think of a job title more pandemic-proof than “superstar livestreamer.” While the coronavirus has upended the working lives of hundreds of millions of people, Dr. Lupo, as he’s known to acolytes, has a basically unaltered routine. He has the same seven-second commute down a flight of stairs. He sits in the same seat, before the same configuration of lights, cameras and monitors. He keeps the same marathon hours, starting every morning at 8.

Social distancing? He’s been doing that since he went pro, 3 years ago.

For 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, he sits alone, hunting and being hunted on games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. With offline spectator sports canceled, he and other well-known gamers currently offer one of the only live contests that meet the standards of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Viewership numbers on Twitch leaped 31 percent from March 8 to March 22, according to Arsenal.gg, a data analytics firm. (By then, one in 4 Americans was under shelter-in-place orders.) During that two-week span, the number of hours a day watched on Twitch rose to 43 million from 33 million.

“Livestreaming and online video games are the only sports we can watch, right?” said Doron Nir, the chief executive of StreamElements, a company that provides tools and services to streamers. “This is a huge moment of validation.”

Lupo and his peers were having the best financial year of their lives even before COVID-19 struck. Three of the biggest tech companies in the world — Microsoft, Facebook and Google — have been trying to raise the profile of their online gaming platforms: Mixer, Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming, respectively. Their goal is to catch up with Amazon, which owns Twitch and roughly 70 percent of online gaming viewership.

All 4 of these giants have embraced the same strategy that keeps LeBron James in Nike sneakers: sign superstars to huge, exclusive contracts.

“You’ve got the biggest tech companies in the world competing for the top talent to stream exclusively on their platform,” said Rod Breslau, who helped start the e-sports section of ESPN’s site. “That gives the talent agency that works for a guy like Lupo a huge amount of leverage to negotiate.”

In December, Breslau said, Twitch signed Lupo and two other streaming stars to multiyear deals worth millions. It was a counterattack of sorts. Over the summer, Tyler Blevins, who plays under the name Ninja and is widely considered one of the best Fortnite players in the world, left Twitch for Mixer in a multiyear deal reportedly worth as much as $30 million.

These are sums that may startle the uninitiated. But Lupo and Blevins are celebrities in a gaming industry that generates more than $150 billion a year in revenue, according to Newzoo, a gaming analytics company — more than double the global film and music industries combined.

Marquee professional athletes from the worlds of basketball, baseball and football are about to jump into this fray. Josh Swartz, an executive at Popdog, which owns a talent agency for gamers, said he is preparing deals on behalf of stars of Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Football League, many of whom are part-time gamers.

“My phone is ringing off the hook with sports agents saying, ‘My guy plays Call of Duty,’ or ‘My guy plays Fortnite.’” he said. “These athletes are just stuck at home. In a lot of cases, they are going to end up with their own streaming channel,” watched by thousands of fans eager to interact with their heroes.

Lupo says he rose to the top of the crowded, highly competitive live-gaming pile through luck. Five years ago, he was an information technology specialist at an insurance company and started livestreaming part-time on a game called Destiny. At first, eight people watched, but the audience grew quickly. Lupo has top-notch skills, the warm, authoritative voice of a drive-time radio DJ and a gift for wry wit, even when mortally wounded.

“Why would I need to practice?” he asked viewers, after losing that Call of Duty game. “I’m a god. I’m insane. Look at my body, dude.”

What truly launched Lupo was a perfectly tossed virtual grenade. He lobbed it at Blevins while the two faced off in a first-person shooter called PUBG. A video of the encounter shows a stupefied look on Blevins’ face, displayed in a corner of the screen, which gradually segues into laughter and delight, as the death of his avatar sinks in.

“We hit it off immediately,” said Lupo. “We were like brothers, and people liked watching that friendship grow.”

Around this time, Fortnite made its debut and became a cultural phenomenon. Lupo and Blevins started teaming up to play against others. (Each game starts with 100 players). Blevins later asked Lupo to serve as a play-by-play commentator during a Fortnite event at the Luxor Resort and Casino in Vegas.

“About 300,000 people watched live,” Lupo said. “And a couple million more watched later.”

Lupo spends each day with an overhead camera pointed at his hands, another camera pointed at the side of his face and a display of what he sees on the screen. Most of the time, he controls an avatar who is both running for his life and in the midst of a frantic killing spree. He and his online teammates — he usually has a few, whom he talks to through a headset — scramble at breakneck speed, defusing bombs, sniping at enemies and hurtling over landscapes in hijacked trucks. It seems the opposite of relaxing.

Lupo’s fan base is riveted. It skews older than the average Twitch gaming channel. He is married — his wife, Samantha, is his manager — and has a 4-year-old son. His biggest supporters tend to hail from a similar demographic.

“He became a dad a couple months after I did,” said Nick Kallner, 34, who lives near Albany and has been watching Lupo since his Destiny days. “I have the sense watching him that he’s a dad like me, a real-world guy. Plus, he’s funny.”

And while Lupo is fluent in the language of bro-speak, his devotees include plenty of women.

“What cemented it for me is how he built a respectful community,” said Lindsey Hladik, who lives in Orlando, Florida. “As a woman, you get a lot of harassment, people casually throwing off offensive terms, and he’s always good about shutting down that kind of behavior.”

Hladik, 34, is a manager at an e-commerce site and has been working from home for the last three weeks. Lupo’s channel plays in the background, all day, every day.

“It’s like having the TV on,” she said.

The difference is that the star of this show performs for hours on end. Keeping energy levels up is just one of Lupo’s challenges. On a few occasions over the years, pranksters have sicced the police on him, calling the authorities and claiming that some horrible crime was unfolding at his house — a toxic gag known as “swatting.” That has made it uncomfortable when fans knock on his door to introduce themselves. In the moment, Lupo can’t help but imagine worst-case scenarios.

Even when there’s just peace and quiet, he spends most of his waking hours in a windowless room. It would be a grim existence, he said, if he didn’t love video games and performing before an audience that keeps growing.

“People are finding ways to distract themselves a bit from what’s going on in the outside world,” he said. “If I’m helping, that’s fantastic.”

The New York Times

Virtual goldmine: In-game goods fuel debate over digital ownership

LONDON - Jon Jacobs was a financially struggling actor in real life but a wealthy trader in an online video game when he had his breakthrough: what if he could turn his virtual success into a steady stream of real dollars?

Jacobs, who mortgaged his home to start investing in virtual property, broke records when he sold his nightclub to other users in the multi-player online game Entropia Universe for $635,000 in 2010.

He makes tens of thousands of dollars each month from his other assets within the game, which allows players to explore a futuristic world and has an exchange rate pegged to the US dollar, meaning money can be taken in or out.

"I think that over the next decade we are going to see exponential growth in the trade of virtual goods," Jacobs told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone call from Los Angeles.

He is among a growing number of players globally spending on virtual goods within games that range in price from a few cents to thousands of dollars - fueling debate on what rights they hold over those digital assets.

The video games market is set to more than double in value to $300 billion by 2025, data and analysis company GlobalData estimates.

Much of the money is made through the sale of in-game virtual property ranging from weapons to outfits and even real estate - and that spending could reach $32 billion in 2020, according to data and research firm Statista.

"There is a shift in the gaming industry towards free-to-play games," said Tamara Slanova, co-founder of DMarket, a platform for game developers and players to sell virtual outfits or other cosmetic items known as 'skins'.

"So now the only way the game developers can earn money is by selling some in-game stuff, basically the outfits in the game or the skins for weapons in the game."

Nearly half of games include in-game purchase options, according to analysis by TIGA - the trade association representing Britain's game industry - of a sample of games released last year by British developers.

The average spend on Dmarket.com is usually only a few dollars, said Slanova, but it is not uncommon for purchases to run into hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

"Sometimes it's really astonishing how much real money people are eager to spend on some virtual stuff," added Slanova.

LICENSE TO PLAY?

While players may be willing to pay up for in-game extras, they have far fewer rights over such digital assets than they would for real-life purchases, said legal experts.

A minority of games allow players to freely buy, trade and sell virtual property, with some gamers making real-world fortunes as a result.

But in most games, users will not get any legal ownership rights over virtual property in return for their money, said Gaetano Dimita, a lecturer in international intellectual property law at Queen Mary University of London.

Instead, they are paying for a license which allows them to use the items within the game under terms dictated by the company, he said, with firms usually reserving the right to change, substitute, or withdraw access to virtual goods.

Players are often not allowed to sell or transfer items to other people, added Dimita, while if their account is suspended or the game shuts down they will see their access cut off.

Digital media like music and e-books are also typically sold through access licenses with similarly tight restrictions.

While full details are laid out in the terms of sale and user licence agreement, many players may not read through legal details often running to thousands of words in legal jargon, said law professor Aaron Perzanowski.

"There is a lot of room for improvement in helping consumers understand how they are investing their time and their money," said Perzanowski of Case Western Reserve University in the US city of Cleveland.

It has led to questions over whether buyers of in-game property or other virtual goods understand exactly what they are - and are not - getting in exchange for their money.

Up to half of people who click 'buy now' on a digital song, book or film wrongly believe they can lend it, give it away or re-sell it, found a 2017 study co-authored by Perzanowski, though he added that games players may be more savvy on average.

"Rights to virtual items are often set out within extensive end-user license terms which some players will not necessarily read upfront," said a TIGA spokesman in an emailed statement.

However, TIGA said that game makers would not want to risk driving players away by removing their virtual property.

"To remove access to purchases could result in very negative publicity which would harm the long-term value of the game."

LAW 'UNCLEAR'

As gaming continues to boom, some players, consumer rights groups and trading platforms are lobbying for players to get greater rights over their virtual goods.

"This demand is growing ... from people that really want to trade skins and to use them as their own property since they paid for it," said Slanova of DMarket.

Court cases have also sought to challenge the broad legal principle that digital items cannot be re-sold by buyers in the same way as physical goods like clothes, records and books, all of which have thriving secondhand markets.

A French court in September found users have the right to re-sell digital games bought through Steam, an online platform developed by US-based games firm Valve Corporation, in a case brought by consumer rights group UFC-Que Choisir.

Valve has said it will appeal the decision.

The developing law around digital rights means the situation is "not particularly clear", said Perzanowski, who added he expects to see more legal challenges in the future.

And the results of court cases over rights for virtual items such as games software will have impact far beyond online players looking to cash in on their digital swag, he said.

"Software is in everything now – it is in your kitchen appliances, it is in your car, it is in medical devices that are implanted in people's bodies," said Perzanowski.

"And all of these same arguments about whether or not you own and control the software are just as true when it comes to physical products that have software embedded into them," he added.

"The answers to these questions are going to have much, much broader implications over the next 10 to 20 years because software is being built into every product you can imagine."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Winning team pockets $15 million in final of esports spectacular

SHANGHAI - More than 600,000 people watched captivated online and thousands packed a downtown Shanghai arena to see team OG take home a life-changing chunk of an esports-record $34.3 million prize pool on Sunday.

The holders defeated fellow European side Team Liquid 3-1 in the grand final of The International, a world championship in the multiplayer battle game Dota 2, to roars of "OG! OG!" from an energized crowd at Mercedes-Benz Arena.

The victorious OG team will pocket at least $15.6 million and the freshly minted multimillionaires frantically embraced on stage after getting the final kills of the tournament.

Eighteen teams from all over the world, each with 5 players, took part in the annual competition of professional players specializing in the hugely popular online game.

They may have lost, but there will be the consolation of a check of $4.5 million for Team Liquid for taking second place.

Liquid defeated PSG.LGD -- the China-based team affiliated to French football giants Paris Saint-Germain -- to reach the decider. PSG.LGD won just over $3 million.

The vast viewership and financial sums are proof of the growing interest in esports, which has launched itself from the bedrooms of teenagers to worldwide prominence in the past decade.

The biggest stars in esports -- most of whom are in their 20s -- are already multimillionaires, but professional gaming can be cut-throat with most players ushered into retirement by the age of 30.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

LOOK: PH team takes major win in Int’l DotA 2 tourney

 Thank you for all the support! GGWP to OG. Big respect for you guys. pic.twitter.com/Rv0BTXUbmT

— TNC Pro Team (@TNCProTeam) August 10, 2016

The Philippine DotA (Defense of the Ancients) representative has pulled off a miracle, beating a major team at the International DotA 2 Championships (TI6) at the Seattle Center in the US.

The Philippine team TNC Gaming defeated OG, the European team in a tightly contested best-of-three match in the lower bracket that saw the Philippine team take away any progression for a team considered to be among the top five groups in the DotA global rankings.

TNC also represented the Southeast Asian region in the tournament. It previously won a spot in the lower bracket of the International DotA 2 Championships during a group stage competition.

TNC is composed of Marco Polo “Raven” Fausto, Carlo “Kuku” Palad, Samson Solomon “Sam_H” Hidalgo, Jimmy “DeMoN” Ho, and Nico “eyyou” Barcelon.

The win would bring them a step closer to winning in the lower bracket event – essentially bringing them up to face the upper bracket players – for the championship game to be held on August 13.

The top prize money for the championship is a staggering US$8,889,984, or over P400 million, one of the highest prizes for any gaming tournament.

The TNC would next be facing off with Digital Chaos.

The International DotA 2 Championship is the world's foremost tournament for DotA and has among the biggest prize money for any gaming competition.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Online games go local for booming SE Asia market

SINGAPORE -- It was while hunting for monsters in a virtual cave that Bend Henmoko Madio met his community and realized why companies are adapting online video games to suit the different languages, tastes and mobile devices in Southeast Asia.

Text translation, dialogue dubbing and character outfits are among the most common tweaks in the "localization" work by firms wanting to capitalize on the region's booming game market and keep players loyal.

"I met these friends when I was playing Rohan: Blood Feud hosted on the Indonesian server," said 32-year-old Madio. "Localization makes it easier to form a community ... After all, it is easier to communicate with fellow countrymen."

Localization is gaining ground in Southeast Asia, where 85 million players spent $661 million last year on online games, research firm Niko Partners says. It expects that spending to hit $1.2 billion by 2017.

"The growth has been quite staggering," said David Ng, chief executive of Singapore-based gaming company Gumi Asia Pte Ltd. "That is what's fueling the localization business because more and more people are starting to realize it's worthwhile."

Gumi Asia, a unit of Japan's Gumi Inc, creates in-house games and also publishes those of its parent, with teams working on localisation for Southeast Asia.

In Puzzle Trooper, a game originally intended for western players, a character resembling the wrestler Hulk Hogan got some manga makeovers.

"When we started doing testing in Southeast Asia, we realised that they don't really like the western art that much," Ng said. "Then we tested with some more Japanese-looking art and the response was really good."

Beyond language, culture

Still, Southeast Asia is far from homogeneous. Gamers in Thailand and Vietnam tend to like Chinese-style outfits, while those in the Philippines love western-style characters such as the original Puzzle Trooper, Ng said.

"Indonesia is hard," he said. "You have the Muslims, Chinese and Christians. It's a mix. It's really difficult to comprehend a market as diverse as that."

Indonesia's nearly 20 million players spent $88.1 million on online gaming in 2012, almost 26 percent higher than the year before, according to Niko Partners.

"The future of game localization in Southeast Asia is going to be decided by the Indonesian market," said Harry Inaba, managing director of localisation firm Synthesis APAC.

Unlike Gumi Asia, independent firms such as Synthesis work on contract with developers wanting to localize their games.

Catering to the Southeast Asian market goes beyond language and culture to include optimizing graphics and adapting to diverse handset types, Ng said. The Android operating system's domination in the region presents a sizable challenge.

With at least nine Android systems now in use and thousands of distinct devices in the market with different screen sizes and graphics capabilities, developers must localize their games into many formats. In contrast, the vast majority of Apple devices run on iOS 7 or the previous version of that system.

Low connection speeds in parts of Southeast Asia hinder developers from using high-quality graphics and elaborate animation, so banners that pop out on the screen would not be ideal as they can take a long time to load.

Instead, developers are using the pixel technology found in older phones that requires lower bandwidth.

Gumi picked the 20 to 30 most popular Android devices to localize into, Ng said, with the ultimate goal of fostering player loyalty by making games "sticky" to various markets.

"Stickiness equates to removing any barriers from their understanding of how to play the games," he said. "To remove barriers, you give them something they're more familiar with."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

New consoles, online games to keep market soaring

PARIS -- The global video gaming market is set to grow 11.1 percent a year until 2017, boosted by a new generation of consoles and the increasing popularity of online games, according to IDATE digital research and consultancy firm.

The market, estimated at 53.9 billion euros ($73.8 billion) this year, is expected to soar to 82.1 billion euros in 2017, the France-based firm said in a report.

Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, which are jostling for control of the gaming market, have each released the latest versions of their consoles ahead of the Christmas shopping season.

The wave of new devices is expected to keep the market buoyant until 2017, IDATE said.

Home consoles like Sony's PlayStation or Microsoft's Xbox, which make up 31 percent of the market today, are expected to have a 40 percent share of the total market in 2017.

Handheld consoles such as Nintendo's 3DS or Sony's PSVita, which have a share of about 22 percent in 2013, are projected to record declining share to 13 percent in 2017, in the face of increasing strong competition from tablets and mobile phones.

"Smartphones and tablets offer a radically different experience, and... in terms of the budget, the tablet is a significant competitor for the consoles," Laurent Michaud, who is in charge of gaming research at IDATE.

"The choice of purchase between the tablet and the console will determine the success of this generation of machines," he said.

The offline computer game is expected to record an irreversible decline, while this year online games are emerging as the leader.

The increasing popularity of online games stems from the fact that they dominate the gaming industry in China and South Korea, Michaud noted.

"They are games oriented towards 'Free2Play' and it is no surprise that they are gaining colossal success because the games are good," he said, referring to the downloadable games.

One example is the online game Candy Crush which records 700 million sessions a day and racks up daily sales of $850,000.

Online games are expected to record average growth of 11.4 percent while mobile gaming is seen progressing by 12.2 percent annually between 2013 and 2017.

Traditional game developers which are used to selling physical copies of their games on discs, have not been keeping pace with virtual ones.

Many were slow to exploit the phenomenal success of games played on social networks.

In December 2012, only Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Namco Bandai Games, Konami, Take Two Interactive et Disney Interactive Studio were present on Facebook.

They have also been slow to join on the smartphone and tablette bandwagon.

In December 2012, only Electronic Arts and Square Enix were among the top revenue generators on Apple's App Store. And only Electronic Arts and Take Two Interactive had games that ranked in the top 20 by revenues.

On Android Market, none of the traditional gave developers had games on the bestsellers' list.

IDATE sees these key players producing fewer and fewer blockbusters, which are also becoming more and more expensive to make.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Sony to charge fees for multiplayer games on PS4

Sony Corp plans to charge a monthly fee of $9.99 in the United States and 6.99 euros ($9.40) in Europe for playing multiplayer online games on its PlayStation 4 (PS4) console scheduled to debut this month, the Nikkei business daily reported without citing sources.

Multiplayer games can be played for free on PlayStation 3.

Sony plans to charge 500 yen ($5.00) a month for multiplayer games in Japan when the new console debuts in February, the Nikkei said.

Sony plans to make PS4 more attractive by including more social networking functions, such as the ability to chat with fellow players, the business daily reported.

Microsoft Corp's Xbox One will also launch this month.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Phishing scam hits World of Warcraft

Not even "Mist of Pandaria," the latest expansion for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, is exempt from phishers.

Security vendor Trend Micro said it started seeing increased phishing in "World of Warcraft" after its maker Blizzard started closed-beta testing in March.

"In these new rounds of phishing attempts, scammers are trying to abuse the WoW’s in-game mail system. In this phishing attempt, the malicious URLs are sent via in-game mail and are received by players in their in-game mailboxes," it said in a blog post.

Under the new racket, a scammer encourages victims to join the "Mist of Pandaria" beta testing and get an exclusive in-game item, the Dragon Turtle Mount.

However, the victim would have to visit and register at their so-called "website," which closely resembles the real Battle.net website.

"If unsuspecting users input their Battle.net credentials it will definitely result to Battle.net account theft. Battle.net is the central account management for all Blizzard games like World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, and Diablo III," Trend Micro said.

Trend Micro also noted recent scamming attempts appeared to target lower-level characters and not high-level or level-capped ones.

It theorized this may be an attempt to avoid detection.

On the other hand, Trend Micro said Blizzard had stepped up its security measures, publishing a dedicated security page to help users understand their security commitment.

Blizzard also promoted its authenticator, available as an iOS or Android app, as a keychain fob. — TJD, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com

Netopia operator to venture into tourism business

MANILA, Philippines -- A listed gaming firm that operates the Netopia chain of internet cafes will venture into the tourism business.

IP E-Game Ventures Inc. told the local bourse that its board approved changes to its Articles of Incorporation, expanding the company's primary purpose beyond gaming and content distribution to include food and beverage, entertainment, hotel and leisure.

E-Game's board also authorized management to look for a new name to reflect the company's expanded mandate. The board resolutions would be presented to stockholders as of February 23 in a meeting on March 22.

Besides offering multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and other casual online games, E-Game operates the country's biggest internet cafe chain after it bought Netopia, CyberOne, and three-fourths of I.T. Log Park.

The company offers a portfolio of online games including massively multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPGs, and casual online games.

From 160 stores, E-Game plans to expand its network to 1,000 in the next two to three years, contributing revenues estimated at P5 billion a year.

The company recently signed up as the official website operator of the National Basketball Association for the Philippine market. E-Game is also the exclusive distributor of Blizzard Entertainment International, the developer of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo.

E-Game shares fell to P0.197 on Thursday from P0.199 the day before.

source: interaksyon.com