Geek News

Last year's gaming controversy has turned into this year's legislative battleground. Fans were outraged when Star Wars: Battlefront II launched with buyable loot boxes that unbalanced multiplayer combat, and other games like Need For Speed: Payback and Destiny 2 had their own pay-to-win controversies. Eventually, loot boxes unsettled enough constituents to rile their representatives. Legislators in Hawaii, Washington and Illinois have introduced bills to either study loot boxes or restrict access to young players, but how effective will they be? What else can lawmakers do? Hawaii state Rep. Chris Lee, a gamer himself (he favors the Battlefield series and Rockstar Games' oeuvre), believes there's plenty to do. The Democrat introduced four bills last month: Two (one introduced to state House and one to the Senate) would restrict loot boxes in Hawaii to those older than 21, while another pair would force companies to disclose the odds of winning potential game ite...

Last month, Major League Soccer became the latest US sports association to create its own eSports league, eMLS, which will exclusively run EA Sports' game FIFA 18 . We knew its first-ever event would be a tournament (the eMLS Cup) at the upcoming PAX East where 19 players, each representing an MLS team, will compete to qualify for the league's global playoffs. But today, the nascent eMLS has laid out how the tournament will go down -- and where folks at home can stream it. The 19 players will be split into two conferences -- ten clubs in the Eastern Conference and nine in the Western. Each competitor will create their own squad of 11 starting players, with seven more on the bench and five in reserve. The catch? Three MLS players have to be on the field at all times, including two from the club that the competitor is representing. Naturally. The eMLS Cup will start on Thursday, April 5th for preliminary rounds, with the top eight players from each conference progressing to ...