We've talked a lot about Multiplay's i49 festival over the past few days. Whether it's zombies, new hardware from MSI, OCUK's hardware delivery or the fact that I forgot my laptop, there's been a lot on. Of course though, if you aren't just one of the visitors and actually brought your PC along, then this weekend was all about gaming.
And there was a lot of that going on too. Seriously, just look at all these gamers:
My brother's team Tempest is somewhere down the back there. Say hi to them if you're there.
And when they weren't playing games, they were listening to people talk about them:
Walking around the gamer halls though, it was clear, the age of the FPS is over, at least in these competitive environments. 90 per cent of the screens I wandered past had one of a few select games running: League of Legends, DotA, DotA 2, Infinite Crisis or Minecraft. There were a few other games in there, classics like Counter Strike, but unless you went to the dedicated CoD gaming area, there wasn't a sign of that oft touted super series of shooters.
There was even a dedicated area where a couple of super cool individuals gave a running commentary on live League of Legends match ups from the ongoing tournament.
And no wonder, those tournaments had big prizes, with £12,000 ( plus a lot of Riot Points) up for grabs for the LoL tournament alone. The DotA 2 tournament had a more modest, £2,000 prize pack, but it's still there.
Watch the live tournament action over at the official Insomnia site.
There's also a lot of FPS tournaments ongoing, including CS: GO, World of Tanks, Halo 4 and Black Ops II, but you'd hardly have known it from the displays around the gaming halls.
KitGuru Says: This makes a big difference from gaming trends a few years back when it was all about the shooters.