This weekend, our friends from Red Bull are bringing their Battle Grounds tournament series to Detroit, Michigan!

The event will be taking place within the Garden Theater of Detroit from August 22nd to the 24th.

Competitor passes and spectator tickets are still available for purchase here.

Red Bull has been a long time supporter of Gamers Outreach. If you’ve never been to a Red Bull event, you owe it to yourself to come out and join us this weekend.Their eSports team really puts together a top-notch show.

We hope to see you this weekend! If you have any questions about the event, reach out to the Red Bull eSports team on twitter – @redbullESPORTS

We’ve got some great news for fellow Midwest eSports enthusiasts! Our friends over at Red Bull are bringing their Battle Grounds series to Detroit, Michigan!

In case you’re unfamiliar, Red Bull Battle Grounds is a StarCraft II tournament circuit that pits some of today’s top professional gamers against one another for prize money and glory.

The Detroit event will feature an open competition for up to 128 StarCraft II players, and boasts a prize pool of $25,000.00. Participation in the tournament is available to all players who’ve achieved at least Diamond status in StarCraft II. Additionally, 4000 WCS points will be awarded to the top 16 finishers, and the tournament winner will receive a trip to compete at the Battle Grounds Grand Final in Washington D.C.

Red Bull Battle Grounds  will be coming to the Garden Theater of Detroit during the weekend of August 22nd – 24th, 2014.

Spectator and tournament passes are available for purchase here.

We hope to see you at the event!

Save the date, friends! Gamers for Giving 2015 will be taking place during the weekend of February 21st and 22nd at Eastern Michigan University’s Student Center.

Additional details and a full schedule for the event will be released over the coming months. As usual, you’ll be able to expect a full weekend of competitive gaming tournaments and LAN party activities.

Here’s the overview of what’s coming…

• BYOC LAN for PC and console gamers, presented by our friends at LANFest.
• Console gaming tournaments.
• Live streams throughout the weekend.
• Special industry guests, giveaways, and more!

Since its inception in 2008, Gamers for Giving has become one of the premier competitive gaming events in the Midwest. Proceeds from Gamers for Giving activities are used to fund charity initiatives managed by Gamers Outreach Foundation, such as building portable gaming carts for children’s hospitals, and sending video game care packages to U.S. troops overseas. The event provides video game enthusiasts with an opportunity to combine passion for gaming with charitable action in a live competitive atmosphere.

The Intel LANFest series  is a nation-wide BYOC (bring your own computer) LAN organization sponsored by Intel that features gaming tournaments and activities intended to entertain both casual and hardcore gamers. Ticket proceeds are donated to local charities. To date, LANFest has raised over $440,00.00 dollars for charity organizations.

Over the coming months, we’ll be updating the Gamers for Giving website with information related to the 2015 event. Until then, you can keep up with all the latest Gamers Outreach happenings by finding us on Twitter or Facebook.

We look forward to seeing you in February, 2015!

In the market for old school video games? Gamers Outreach has launched an eBay store! We’re in the process of selling off older titles in our donated games inventory that can’t be directly used for our charity programs.

As a new seller on eBay, we can only upload 5 items in the ‘video game’ category at a time. Be on the look out for newly uploaded batches of games as items sell!

The entire collection of items for sale can be found here.

Let us know if anything catches your eye!

For those of you who requested Gamers for Giving 2014 stickers, all stickers were mailed out in mid April. If you have not yet received your stickers, shoot us an email via contact@gamersoutreach.org and we’ll send over a new batch asap!

That is all.

Last week, Gamers Outreach met with Eastern Michigan University to discuss Saturday’s internet outage during Gamers for Giving. As those of you who participated in the BYOC LAN are aware, Eastern’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) experienced technical difficulties during our event, which greatly impacted the school’s ability to provide quality service to our attendees on Saturday.

Everyone who participated in the BYOC LAN should have received an email last week which detailed two possible options for attendees who were affected. Attendees can either choose to request a refund, or participate in our online League of Legends tournament. Both scenarios are outlined below…

• Request a Refund: Eastern Michigan has offered to refund attendees who were inconvenienced or were unable to participate in planned activities on Saturday. The refund process will not affect funds that were generated at Gamers for Giving to support the charity programs of Gamers Outreach. Refunds can be requested by opening a support ticket on the Intel LANFest website, located here. Please make the subject of your ticket “GFG Refund Request.” In the body of your message, provide us with your PayPal transaction ID. A representative from LANFest will issue your refund. The refund request period will close at 11:59 PM on March 7th, 2014.
• League of Legends: We will be hosting this year’s headline League of Legends tournament online. The tournament will feature the same guaranteed cash prize pool, as well as A30 Headsets for the team that finishes in 1st place. Registration for the tournament is available to everyone who purchased a seat in the BYOC LAN. Registration is not available for players who request a refund (see above). To participate, please follow the steps below…
  • Have your team captain complete the registration form, located here. Registration will close on Monday, March 10th.
  • The tournament will take place on Saturday, March 15th and Sunday, March 16th. Any schedule changes will be communicated in advance by the tournament moderator.
  • The tournament format, schedule, and general guidelines for how the event will run will be communicated to all teams by the tournament moderator on Tuesday, March 11th.
  • 1st Place will receive $1,500 (split between players) and Astro A30 headsets.
  • 2nd Place will receive $750.

ISP problems aside, Gamers Outreach plans to continue to work with Eastern as we host Gamers for Giving in the future. Eastern has been an incredibly supportive partner over the years, and we greatly value the relationship that’s been cultivated between our organization and the University.

We also want to send a big thanks to all of our LAN attendees for being patient alongside us as we worked through Saturday’s incident. Our team of volunteers put in some crazy hours to make Gamers for Giving a reality. It’s an event we love hosting, and we hope to continue producing the event for years to come. Your support means the world to us, and we can’t wait to see you again in 2015!

The team over at Gamers Look just sent us this video recapping their experience at Gamers for Giving 2014. The video does a great job of showcasing what this year’s event was all about. Give it a watch!

We’ve just uploaded over 500 more photos to the Gamers for Giving 2014 album on our Facebook page! Big thanks go out to Maher El-awar, Brian Johnson, and David Saunders for collecting media content throughout the weekend! There are still more pictures to come, so be on the look out!

Photos can be viewed on the Gamers Outreach Facebook page, located here.

The results are in! Thanks to attendee entry fees, donations we received on-site, Peggle 2 entries, as well as PayPal donations and excess sponsorship, Gamers for Giving 2014 was able to raise a total of $20,682.37!!

For those curious, here’s how the numbers broke down…

• Online Registration & donations (pre-event): $12,970.00
• Raffle ticket sales, Peggle, door sales, and on-site donations: $5,510.00
• Stream donations, mail-in donations, and excess sponsorship: $2,202.37

Total = $20,682.37

This is absolutely incredible news! Thanks to everyone who was a part of this year’s event, we were able to surpass our $20,000 fundraising goal in support of Gamers Outreach programs in 2014.

As mentioned during this year’s event, Project GO Kart (our initiative which provides portable video game carts to kids in hospitals) currently serves ~6,000 children per year. We estimate that on average, one cart is used by 3 children each day in the hospital environment (1 cart = ~1,100 children benefiting per year). With funds on hold since last year (as we’ve waited for the Xbox One to launch) Gamers Outreach will be constructing an additional 4 carts, bringing the total number of children served by the program to 10,000 kids per year by the end of Summer.

Now, with the addition of funds raised at Gamers for Giving 2014, we’ll be able to increase that number to nearly 15,000 children per year. In addition to the resources generated by Gamers for Giving, if additional fundraising efforts take place throughout the year, it’s very possible Project GO Kart could be serving nearly 20,000 children or more by the end of 2014. That means that in a single year, thanks to all the generous people who supported Gamers for Giving, the Project GO Kart initiative could triple its current size. That’s really amazing.

On the military end of the spectrum, for those who’ve been keeping up with Fun For Our Troops, you’ll know that we spent much of last year relocating our donated games inventory to our home base in Michigan. Currently, we’re sitting on a mountain of video games that are ready to be sent overseas to deployed troops. Thanks to Gamers for Giving, a portion of the funds raised at this year’s event will be used to help us pay for shipping costs associated with sending these care packages overseas. Additionally, in order to reach more deployed troops, Gamers Outreach plans to work with Eastern Michigan’s ROTC department to help identify troops abroad who will benefit most from our initiative.

You can keep up with the work of our organization as our initiatives expand over the course of the year at http://www.GamersOutreach.org.

We’d like to send our deepest thanks to everyone who came out and supported this year’s Gamers for Giving. From our crew of casters and volunteers, to everyone who attended and supported online – thank you!!

Also, it must be mentioned, one of the main reasons Gamers for Giving exists in the capacity that it does is because of the support we receive from our friends and sponsors in the industry. Folks like Astro Gaming,  the Intel LANFest series, and Twitch.tv help make our event possible. Their support means we’re able to maximize the impact our donations and attendee entry fees have on Gamers Outreach charity projects. Please swing by our Partners page and show each of our contributors some love. They certainly deserve it!

As many of you know, this event was not without its challenges. On Saturday, limited bandwidth greatly impacted our ability to conduct some of our event’s planned activities, primarily for folks who participated in the BYOC LAN. As mentioned in our previous emails and updates, we are currently in the process of working with Eastern to rectify the situation. We have proposed a solution which we believe would be most fair for attendees who were affected, and would still provide those who wish to compete in our League of Legends tournament with the ability to do so online. We will be issuing a final announcement next week, as we are currently in the process of finishing discussions with Eastern. If you have any questions regarding this topic, feel free to send us an email via contact@gamersoutreach.org.

From everyone at Gamers Outreach Foundation, THANK YOU for supporting Gamers for Giving 2014! We hope to see you at next year’s event!

Our first batch of photos from Gamers for Giving 2014 have been posted to our Facebook page, courtesy of @jamsessionzzz. We’ll be uploading many, many more over the coming days – so be sure to keep an eye out! All photos will be posted to our organization’s Facebook page.

If you have some of your own you’d like to share, tweet them to us @GamersOutreach!