Spend an afternoon at a Top 8 Finals of any fighting game tournament, and you will find there is a robust side-betting culture in esports. Pseudo-gambling activities like “skin wagers” in Counter-Strike have been a part of esports culture from the beginning, and fringe sites like XLBet have included StarCraft games…

“Game developers don’t like me,” said Sabina Hemmi. “Before I came around, there was no insight into how balanced a game was.”

When it arrives in December, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will feature over 60 playable characters from the franchise’s 20-year history. While this caters to both the nostalgia-minded and completionist alike, it has the potential to be a nightmare for anyone looking to host competitive events.

Street Fighter V came out two years ago, and I still can’t stop thinking about how homoerotic the tutorial is. I don’t know who wrote the English translation for the tutorial, which features young rivals Ken and Ryu sweating through a workout under the direction of their master Gouken, but I can’t let it go.

A world championship tour for Dragon Ball Fighter Z will see qualifying competitions in seven different countries, each with its own Dragon Ball as a prize. But what if one competitor wins all seven?

Every day is Christmas at the Philadelphia Fusion esports mansion. The team’s marketing and content director Hung Tran gestured to the towering decorated pine tree to the right of the front door by way of explaining the joke: the pro gamers who live here get whatever they want and do whatever they want. But Christmas…

For a long time, League of Legends has had a consistent metagame. But the competitive environment and the individual and team strategies that result have recently changed at a rapid pace, leading to earlier fights, faster games, and a wild shift in the way players try to out-pick and out-play each other.

The first 12 team slots in the Overwatch League cost, reportedly, $20 million each. This was mostly because at least a dozen rich people were willing to give that much money to Blizzard, but was also at least in part to avoid situations like the ongoing disgrace that is the Miami Marlins, where a cash-poor owner…

The North American open qualifiers for the 2018 Dota 2 International were off to the races yesterday, with dozens of games being played to determine who would take a regional spot. And then along came a patch containing Dota 2's new battle royale mode, and everything fell apart.

LOS ANGELES—Paper streamers fluttered down on Smash champion Gonzalo “Zero” Barrios in the red light of a former burlesque theater in downtown Los Angeles. Barrios, the world’s best Super Smash Bros. Wii U player, winked at the camera and flashed a peace sign.

Fortnite on Switch will support voice chat through the headphone jack and not through some stupid phone app, just like a normal-ass game. It’s not currently available in the Switch version of Epic’s popular battle royale game that launched today, but will be on Thursday.

Samus is no longer the only playable Metroid character in Smash. She’s now joined by Ridley, a menacing space dragon who refuses to die no matter how many times he gets owned. To the casual observer, this is just a neat little thing. To Smash diehards, though, it’s the culmination of years of requests. And memes.

Fortnite is (finally) on the Nintendo Switch. Starting today at 10am PT/ 1 ET, you have a whole new way to get in trouble for playing it in class.

Super Smash Bros. has traditionally cast a wide net across a divided audience who demand contradictory things from the blockbuster platform fighter. For its party-game fan contingent, Smash rains down Bob-ombs and Party Balls. For its fiercely competitive fan contingent, it flattens stages and removes platforms. In…

In its biggest expansion since release, For Honor is getting an entirely new faction, graphical overhaul, and new competitive siege mode called Breach in its Marching Fire update coming October 16, 2018.

Beyond the Summit held its first traditional fighting game event this last weekend, inviting 16 Dragon Ball FighterZ players to Southern California for a four-day tournament. But even with competitors like Dominique “SonicFox” McLean, Goichi “GO1” Kishida, and Sho “Fenritti” Shoji in attendance, one surprising figure…

Bandai Namco has announced Jump Force, a new game that mashes up characters from Shonen Jump manga, like Dragon Ball, Naruto, and One Piece. It’s coming in 2019.

While this weekend’s Summit of Power rages on at the Beyond the Summit house, one factoid has been haunting me. During Thursday’s events, Vineeth “ApologyMan” Meka was caught on camera, warming up his cereal milk in the microwave.