This week I popped into the IGN studio to get face to face with Cam Shea and geek out about all the latest news around Hearthstone. We dive into the Year of the Dragon, the Specialist esports format, the Rise of Shadows announcement and the idea of a whole story threading through the year ahead. Plus how important this year’s rotation is as well as those early Hall of Fame moves.

Over at IEM I caught up with two of the Aussie casters covering all the action from the Starcraft stage. Usually we only ever get one of these great Australians calling on the world stage at a time, so it was special to be able to catch both Jared ‘PiG’ Krenzel and Leigh ‘Maynarde’ Mandalov behind the scenes on the other side of the world.

This week I’ve got two of the members of the Fnatic Rainbow Six team – team captain Etienne ‘Magnet’ Rousseau, and coach/manager Jayden ‘Dizzle’ Saunders.

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).

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.

The latest Esports Moment is a chat with Order General Manager Jake ‘Spawn’ Tiberi and Order Chairman Adrian Giles. From founding the org to the future of the industry, we cover a lot of ground in this latest episode.

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.

Every week, every month, there’s yet another sign that now is the time when esports levels up and shows the wider world why it’s time to take notice. This new show – The Esports Moment – will talk to people who have had a big hand in the esports journey so far, and those who are shaping its future.

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.