Sometimes video games communities do awesome things. Their passion for the games they love underlined by their ability to galvanise their peers into doing something really rather cool. Company of Heroes 2 community stalwart, Matt Dunn, aka ‘A_E’, and a handful of likeminded friends did just that. They took it upon themselves to crowdfund a Grand Championship Series via Kickstarter. Not only did they achieve four times more than their £1400 goal, they earned investment from Relic and the interest of UK based eSports outfit, ESL, to help promote the event.
The Grand Championship Finals will take place in front of a live audience at ESL’s studio in Leicester, UK at 2pm BST on Saturday, 1st July and will be streamed live on Twitch on COH2 caster Stormless’ channel where he’ll be joined by ‘A_E’ to host the event. The contestants in the final are two of the world’s best COH2 players, ‘DevM’ and ‘Luvnest’, with the winner set to land £1400. While that might seem like a small amount in comparison to top eSports tournaments, the money was raised almost entirely by the community.
The finalists have been preparing for the final with some respectful, yet serious fighting talk:
DevM: “Fighting Luvnest will be the ultimate challenge of my career in COH2 since he is a very skilled and flexible player. To beat him I will have to make him pay for his mistakes and that is exactly what I plan to do. I won’t stop until I’ve proven 100% that I am the undisputed best player in the game and the only thing standing in my way of that title is Luvnest.”
Luvnest: “I’m looking forward to playing DevM in the final. I’ve come a long way, playing the best players this game has to offer, there is no way that I will be stopped now. The GCS trophy won’t be going to Portugal I’m afraid.”
32 of the world’s best Company of Heroes 2 players competed over a six-week period to reach this stage. You can recap on all the matches so far by visiting ‘A_E’’s YouTube page or watch the highlights here.
For more information about the how the tournament came to be, please see the attached one-pager written by Matt Dunn. For more information about COH2, log on to www.companyofheroes.com