You now have a (very good) reason to start playing Dota 2

It’s time to get your mouse fingers limbered up, it’s time to join the pro gamer circuit. Again. This weekend we saw some gamers win an absolute buttload of money. It was Valve’s Dota 2 championship, and the winning team walked away with just shy of $16 million. The whole prize pool consisted of a record-breaking $34,292,599. To put that number in perspective, the Tour de France prize pool is a total of €2.3 million (which works out to $2.5 million). Obviously, in this instance, Dota is a team sport and the winnings are split. But we can easily bring up the recent Fortnite comp where a thirteen-year-old won a total of $3 million. Now that’s a lot of cash. Esports is quickly becoming one of the most lucrative competitive avenues young people can travel down, and we just wish we’d started playing Dota when it wasn’t cool yet.

Source: Engadget

Get ready for some Clickbait on Netflix

Okay, that was a bit misleading. One could even say the above title is a form of clickbait (wink, wink). But Netflix scooped up a Black Mirror-esque thriller series that will dive into the perils of the digital age and social media. The series is actually called Clickbait and will have Australian filmmaker Tony Ayres at the helm. Also joining the team is Harry Potter producer, David Heyman, who will manage the production side. You know us, we’re suckers for any discussion about the digital revolution and how it’ll impact our future. We’re especially excited about this one after the success of a previous Netflix doccie, The Great Hack, that detailed Facebook’s massive Cambridge Analytica leak.

Source: Engadget

Get ready for Minecraft in AR on Android

You probably never thought you’d see the day Minecraft is redeveloped for AR. It’s just a bunch of 8-bit blocks, right? Nope. The Minecraft community is absolutely alive and well, with Minecraft recently becoming the most-searched game on YouTube. It might have something to do with Pewdiepie starting to stream the game online again, but we don’t really care. Minecraft Earth, the AR mobile game, is finally taking signups for the prerelease on Android. Not sure what to expect? We’re thinking a Pokémon Go-style mobile game that brings creepers and zombies to life all while you build blocks irl. Check out the reveal trailer here, if you’re still not convinced, and head to the Minecraft Earth Beta site to sign up for Android.

Source: The Verge

Apple’s planning some noise-cancelling AirPods for 2020

It looks like Apple is set to launch third-gen AirPods with a noise-cancellation feature by the next year. Which is… later than we would have liked. Rumours suggest that the highly-anticipated AirPods 3 has been pushed back to 2020. *sadface*. We haven’t seen any real updates on the AirPods side for a considerable amount of time, and noise-cancellation is already widely available on competitors’ pods. It feels like Apple keep getting more and more behind on including widely available features (ahem* in-display fingerprint sensor, ahem*). And that fact might be back to bite them soon. Either way, we’re excited to see what the AirPods 3 have to offer next year. It really better be something good, but we’ll also accept ‘has the same features as everyone else’.