$1M Modern Warfare 3 Prerelease Tourney

Bizarrely huge cash prizes and first-hands-on tournaments on a massive scale seem to be the order of the next generation of video game releases.  Dota 2’s ‘International’ was a huge success (congratulations to Ukrainian World Champions, Na’Vi for their million dollar victory, by the way) and Activision is wasting no time recreating the event in their image for the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 this weekend.

International qualifiers are being held all over, with the top teams earning one of 28 invitations to the party, while the remaining 4 invitations will be available at the doors where left behind scrubs will get cut-throat, playing one last tournament for a chance to get inside.  Once again, when the smoke clears and the last bullet flies, there will be a cool million dollars awarded to the grand champion.  This party, however, will rock just a bit harder, as Activision has secured Boston’s Dropkick Murphys to open their party with a performance.  Strangely, Kanye West will also be in attendance, performing some kind of concert at the end of the event.

It seems like only last month being excited about a new game meant getting rained on outside a retail game store until midnight.  This recent trend toward massive parties where the Dropkick Murphys belt their songs out angrily over a massive pit of mercenaries shooting each other down for a life-changing pile of money should fill my fellow gamers with more than a little excitement.

GameStop Removes OnLive Coupons from Deus Ex

Here’s a piece of news that should shock none of you:

Video game retailing giant GameStop has recently confirmed reports that it instructed its employees to open new copies of the freshly released cult-favorite Deus Ex: Human Revolution and remove a second, free version of the game added by competitors OnLive.  In other words, each new copy of the disc for Deus Ex, also came with a code with which any user could access that game through OnLive’s microconsole or nearly any PC.  I can sense the wheels turning as our readers consider the ways they might have put that extra copy to use if they had bought the game elsewhere.

GameStop officials claim that SquareEnix bundled the coupons in with the game without their knowledge, and appears to be fairly cavalier about the situation, leading this writer to surmise that Gamestop has already crafted whatever dark lawyer cabal is necessary to see this action through.  SquareEnix has plenty of support and resources to buy their own legal interpretation, being the font from which many fan favorite series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest spring.

Let the legal games begin.  

Also, if you like free bonus versions of Deux Ex, you might want to get your game(s) somewhere else.

Dota 2 and International Championship Revealed

The trailer for Dota 2 is finally out and with it comes Valve’s announcement of the International Dota 2 Championships.  The World’s top sixteen Dota teams will be meeting in Cologne, Germany tomorrow to battle it out over five days in a double elimination tournament with over a million dollars in prizes.  Teams from China, France, Thailand, Russia, Denmark, Singapore, Malaysia and Ukraine, as well as two international European groups, will compete for fame, honor and cash on the world stage as the championships are streamed in four languages across the internet.  Hordes of eager fans will be watching to get their first glimpse of the new Dota.

No pressure.

Meanwhile, the 2011-2012 continues to look strong for other game releases as well.  The third installments in both the Modern Warfare and Battlefield titles are months away.  Dota 2’s appearance will push crowd-favorites like League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth to step up or fade away.  And with the Diablo 3 beta running throughout the end of this year, we might even see the well anticipated title at Digital Overload next year.