Tickets to participate in Gamers for Giving 2016 will be made available on December 4th, 2015! Throughout next week, we’ll be unveiling the remaining headline activities in store for attendees at our eighth annual fundraising event.

Gamers for Giving 2016 will feature a variety of activities for competitive, hardcore, and casual gamers alike. True to our roots, esports will play a large role in next year’s event, but there will be plenty of opportunities for all attendees to enjoy activities that are focused solely on fun (rocket league tournament, anyone??).

On the charity side of things, we’ll be chasing after a $100,000 fundraising goal at next year’s event! Thanks to funds raised from our last Gamers for Giving, the impact of Gamers Outreach programs has tripled. We now support children and families in 16 hospitals across the country, largely thanks to the generosity of those who’ve participated in Gamers for Giving. Each person’s participation translates to support for hospitalized kids around the country. Our goal in 2016 will be to expand that impact.  We’ll be releasing more information on our fundraising goal as the weeks unfold, with specific benchmarks for how we hope to provide recreation to hospitalized children within our own state of Michigan, as well as across the country.

We fully anticipate Gamers for Giving 2016 to be our most exciting event to date, and we can’t wait to share the experience with you. We hope you’ll join us on March 12th & 13th at the Eastern Michigan University Convocation Center!

If you enjoy getting hyped over CAD layouts as much as we do, this announcement is for you! We’ve just finished the Gamers for Giving 2016 venue floor plan!

The EMU Convocation Center provides us with more than twice the space of the student center. As such, there are a number of new opportunities available to help us expand our offering of activities, and in time, grow our event’s capacity.

Here are some of the upgrades we’ll be making in 2016!

• More BYOC LAN Seats: Gamers for Giving 2016 will have 416 total available seats for those who want to spend the entire weekend gaming in the LAN!
• Dedicated area for streamers: We’re inviting some of our favorite streamers to next year’s event in support of the cause! Guest list to be announced!
• VIP Seating: Part of the available LAN seats include a designated “VIP” area. These seats will come with a few exclusive features for attendees seeking a more curated experience during next year’s event. Benefits and details will be announced when registration becomes available.
• Exhibitor Booths: We’ll be highlighting the work of our partners and sponsors in a dedicated exhibitor area, located towards the main entrance of the venue.
• Centralized NOC: Located underneath the arena’s jumbotron, the NOC (Network Operations Center) will be a centralized area containing our entire staff of network, server, and tournament administrators.

While the layout is subject to change, here’s how the venue is shaping up for next year. Hope to see you there!

Fellow members of the glorious PC master race: we bear good news! Today we are proud to announce the Gamers for Giving 2016 headline tournaments for PC enthusiasts! Tournaments for each of the following titles will feature a guaranteed cash prize, and will be available to all PC gamers who purchase seats in our BYOC LAN party.

Note: the BYOC LAN party features activities for competitive and casual gamers alike. The list below simply includes the titles we’ve selected to feature as our headline PC tournaments. There will certainly be an array of additional games played at the LAN. We will post information regarding our lineup of casual activities in the coming weeks.

Settings and respective prize pools for each tournament will be made available in the near future. For the time being, we hope this preview will give you the chance to ready yourself and prepare for an incredible weekend of competition at Gamers for Giving 2016! We look forward to seeing you on March 12th & 13th at the EMU Convocation Center!

For those of you interested in locking down your travel arrangements, we’ve just secured a block of rooms at the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti Eagle Crest Hotel! The hotel is located approximately 4 miles from the venue, and is the official hospitality provider of Gamers for Giving 2016. If you want to hang out with our special guests or volunteer crew after-hours, this is where we’ll be!

Rooms can be booked at a discounted rate of $125/night for the evenings of March 10th – March 14th, 2016.

Reservations can be made using the following link: Book Room

Note: the Gamers for Giving venue will stay open throughout the evening of our event, and attendees are welcome to stay at the venue. However, if roughing the weekend with a sleeping bag or inflatable mattress doesn’t sound like your thing, we recommend checking out the hotel.

If you experience any problems booking your room due to availability, please let us know so that we can reserve more space! Drop an email to contact@gamersoutreach.org.

Hope to see you March 12th & 13th!

Mark you calendars, friends! Our next annual Gamers for Giving event will be taking place over the course of March 12th and 13th, 2016!

We’re also moving to a larger venue! Gamers for Giving 2016 will be hosted within the main arena of the Eastern Michigan University Convocation Center! The Convocation Center plays host to an array of events, including concerts, trade shows, banquets, and now – Gamers for Giving!

Eastern’s Convocation Center provides us with greater flexibility and more resources to create an absolutely incredible experience for Gamers for Giving attendees. For the past 7 years, we’ve been proud to work with staff and students at Eastern Michigan University who’ve helped facilitate the existence our annual fundraising event on Eastern’s campus. Now, with access to a larger venue, (nearly double the size of the student center) and with the support of the University, we’re better equipped than ever before to expand Gamers for Giving.

While the Student Center (our previous venue) has been a great home, as was obvious to anyone who attended this past February’s event, we simply need more space! The Convocation Center is well equipped to accommodate the growth of Gamers for Giving, as well as our need for electricity and bandwidth – the core elements which are absolutely vital to our event and our participants. The Convocation Center is in close proximity to our former venue, so if you’ve attended Gamers for Giving in the past, many of your previous travel arrangements will be similar.

Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing more information regarding Gamers for Giving 2016, including our fundraising goal, as well as our schedule of headline tournaments and activities. As usual, you’ll be able to expect a full weekend of competitive gaming tournaments and casual LAN party activities.

You can stay in sync with the latest news related to Gamers for Giving 2016 by checking the Gamers for Giving Blog, or following us on Twitter and Facebook. Be sure to use the official hashtag #GFG2016 on Twitter!

We can’t wait for next year’s event! Hope to see you there!

The title says it all. Earlier this week, we launched a freshly redesigned GamersOutreach.org! The goal of the new site is to help improve our ability to communicate the impact of our charity initiatives, and carry out our activities more effectively. We hope to expand our efforts within the children’s hospital environment, and updating our website to create easier opportunities for involvement is a major step towards helping more patients and families.

GamersOutreach.org is the home for all content related to our organization’s charity programs. On that site, you’ll find blog posts about the latest work we’ve conducted within children’s hospitals, feedback we’ve received from staff, and musings on the impact games are making in the lives of patients and families we serve.

Meanwhile, this website (GamersforGiving.org) will remain focused primarily on content related to our annual fundraising event, Gamers for Giving. We felt it easiest to organize content on two separate websites so Gamers for Giving attendees would have an easier time finding information related to each year’s activities.

That said, we’ll be soon announcing details related to Gamers for Giving 2016! Be sure to check back in the next few days for our date and venue announcement!

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop a line over on Twitter @GamersOutreach or via email at contact@gamersoutreach.org.

In case you were wondering, yes, Gamers for Giving 2016 planning is underway! We will hopefully be announcing the location and dates for next year’s event at some point within a couple of months.

Could this blog post be any more ambiguous? Probably not. Is this an announcement for a potential announcement? Guilty.

In the meantime, be sure to follow Gamers Outreach on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates. We’ve got some cool stuff to unveil over the next few weeks!

Did we really just tease another announcement?? Yes we did.

That’s all for now.

If you live near Atlanta, Georgia – or are willing to make the trip – the Atlanta LANFest chapter will be hosting a BYOC LAN party next month to raise funds for Gamers Outreach!

The event is taking place over the course of May 22nd – 24th at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel. Tournaments and free play PC gaming activities will occur throughout the weekend.

160 seats are available in the LAN party. Last year’s event raised more than $4,600.00 for Gamers Outreach.

Information and registration are available here.

Hope to see you out there!

For those who won prizes during the Gamers for Giving 2015 raffle but were not present to claim them at the event, please note: we will be mailing prizes at the end of this week! If additional information is needed to ship your prize, we will be contacting you via the email or phone number you left on your raffle ticket. Those messages will be going out Friday evening, so be on the look out!

For everyone who left their mailing information, please send us an email via contact@gamersoutreach.org if your prizes do not arrive within 1 – 2 weeks of Friday, March 13th 2015.

Thanks to all who contributed! That is all.

During Gamers for Giving, we had the chance to sit down with the folks from Halo to talk about our work within children’s hospitals! Our discussion was featured as a segment in their recent update on the Halo Championship Series.

If you’ve got a couple minutes, give this video a watch! It’s a great summary of how Gamers for Giving has helped us deliver games to kids in hospitals, and also features some of our recent activity!

The Gamers Outreach segment starts at 2:38. See it here!