By now, anyone interested in the local esports scene would have heard the story surrounding Orena and Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC). Earlier this month ESWC announced its African qualifiers for its CSGO tournament and South Africa was a noticeable omission to the lineup. Which is just the tip of the iceberg of this particular story.

This year’s version is a competent upgrade for the series. On its own, it stands tall as an excellent farm simulator, packed with features and with a level of complexity carefully hidden under its seemingly simple menus

National Treasury is looking to introduce a new regulation that would force international services to evaluate what they offer and reclassify themselves as an electronic service. The takeaway here, is that doing so will mean that these companies will have to register for VAT in South Africa, which likely means that consumers will be paying extra at the end of the day for their subscription of choice.

Now, with Webster being elected as the president of the IESF, having a senior figure from a local organisation at such a high level should be cause for celebration. Instead, it barely registers for many and not just because of the lack of announcements.

Getting multiplayer servers set up for games is a challenge, on top of all the work that goes into making games themselves. There’s an awful lot to contemplate, including the type of hardware, how many players to expect, the sorts of matchmaking types to support and an awful lot more. It’s why dedicated servers that run in the cloud – on systems like Amazon’s Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. Microsoft wants even more developers to use Azure.

Microsoft’s Game Pass is astounding value, especially now that it’s home to game like the incomparable Forza Horizon 4, and also other first party games like Sea of thieves and State of Decay 2. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has now been added toom, and soon it’ll see Ori, Void Bastard, and the incredibly impactful Hellblade added to the rotating library of over a hundred games. For the R159 a month it costs, it’s worth every cent. For a limited time, a one-month subscription is available for R5. Yes, Five Rand.

There’s a lot to love about Call of Duty Black Ops IIII. It’s fast, the emphasis on multiplayer has made it more polished than ever and Blackout is a pitch perfect combination of battle royale ideas and Call of Duty’s own legacy. What the Blackout part of the game certainly isn’t right now, is anywhere near playable if you happen to live south of the equator, with many South American and South African players complaining lately of being unable to join any games in a variety of modes.

South Africa has become a favourite choice of international film productions partially due to tax incentives that encourage the use of local resources. However, changes to this program to align with national black economic empowerment has resulted in apprehension from big international film studios to film here.