I sit down with two of the key brains behind Rainbow Six Siege and its smart and steady rise toward the top tier of global esports. Esports Director François-Xavier Dénièle and Brand Director Alexandre Remy. We talk about the road so far, the moves to open up their ecosystem to more third-party tournament partners, and their ambitions for the year ahead (and beyond).

It has been a very nervous wait for Hearthstone esports fans, with a slow road to finding out how they were changing things up for the 2019 season and beyond. We finally got the news and it feels like quite the mixed bag.

Between a new price drop and the addition of a simplified set of starting choices for Newcomers, Rainbow Six Siege is making it easy for anyone who’s ever wanted to take it for a test drive.

Welcome to the Outback, ya bloody drongos. Or maybe that should be flamin’ galahs? Thankfully, Siege’s take on bringing Aussie operators and an Australian map to the game aren’t quite that cringeworthy. It rides that line soooo closely, but overall, it’s OTT grouse Aussie Straya yobo stuff – but it works.

I touch on the big, bad news out of Blizzard from last week to kick things off, then the show is a feature interview about the future of revisiting the past in WoW Classic with Countdown To Classic podcast host, Josh Corbett.

Seamus was in Melbourne for the Fortnite Summer Smash event at the Australian Open and interviewed a host of streamers, competitors and organisers about the show. Featuring Loserfruit, Valkyrae, MrFreshAsian, DrLupo, Vondle, TheSchnake, Altro47, and Mark Reidy from Tennis Australia.

Luke Lancaster, Content Manager at ReedPop (ComicCon, PAX Aus) is our awesome guest host this week, along with a Seamus having a very bad microphone day.

Who’d have guessed twelve months ago that Fortnite would hold a major esports event at the Australian Open with the biggest prize pool in our nation’s history?

Blizzard shocked fans when they announced they were shutting down the Heroes Global Championship at the end of 2018. But now the esports community is stepping up to keep the scene alive. All we now need is the fans to show up and make it a viable long term effort.

We’re back after the summer break (which included a literal break of a bone, so things were slower than we expected…) and this is a short and sweet catch up on what went down and just how important the year ahead seems to be for Blizzard.