What started as a Counter-Strike 1.6 community map called de_cpl_strike created by Michael "BubkeZ" Hull, would eventually become the de_mirage known today when it was altered in 2004. Valve would later remake the map for the launch of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive . This version has been featured in every CS:GO Major Championships to date and has consistently been in the top 5 most played maps in both casual and professional play since 2

With his Twitch career falling to the wayside as a result, it is estimated that ItsSliker stole close to $200,000 from people within the Twitch community, sparking a huge flurry of debates surrounding the state of Twitch gambling and how it is ruining the platform. In the wake of these revelations, extremely influential streamers such as Pokimane took to Twitter to demand that Twitch ban gambling on the platform, with her tweet receiving over 300,000 li

Tekken takes these pains and doubles them with tons of jargon that newcomers have probably never heard. Not only that, but each character has dozens of moves, with some even having over 100 moves on their lists! If learning this for one character isn't intimidating enough, newcomers will quickly find that it's important to understand match-ups and learn other characters' moves in order to play off their opponents. Like many of these games though, it's incredibly rewarding to learn Tekken and climb its ra

This, doubled with the game's wildly difficult execution, makes the game one of the hardest for newcomers to approach in the fighting game scene. KoF XV has tons of pretzel inputs that are physically hard to pull off, and can lead to injured wrists if done too often or incorrectly. All in all, KoF XV is a fun yet brutal SLG game news for newcomers to le

Websites quickly began exploiting the craze surrounding Counter Strike 's in-game items, with sites like CSGO Lotto allowing players to trade their items for eligibility into raffles for extremely valuable prizes. Many streamers began promoting these kinds of websites, often without disclosing their financial stakes in the services they were promoting. For example, popular streamer Phantoml0rd was famously permanently banned from Twitch for just this reason, despite later winning a civil suit against the platform. Twitch would quickly go on to ban these kinds of raffle or gambling websites related to CSGO , marking one of the first major gambling controversies for the serv

Platforms: PC

Call Of Duty: Warzone is the much-awaited Call Of Duty take on the battle royale genre. A completely free game for Call Of Duty newcomers and savants alike, Call Of Duty: Warzone is a very grounded approach to the battle royale genre with unique takes on mechanics. Exclusive to Warzone is the Gulag, or a post-death zone where players have to fight to the death to earn the "right" to be respawned back into the battlefi

On its launch in 2015, Rainbow Six Siege had 20 unlockable operators for players to choose from, and a small pool of maps. Now, seven years later, the game sports 63 playable operators and 21 maps. Rainbow Six Siege was already difficult for new players thanks to its large maps, destructibility, and layered strategy that requires good team play and communication. Now, with 63 operators and a massive player base, new players are often completely overwhel

Counter Strike: Global Offensive has often been a source of gambling-related controversy, and so it is no wonder that this inevitably translated over to the Twitch platform. CSGO's case unboxing system provides a small opportunity for players to possibly receive items worth huge amounts of real-world money and was one of the first titles to really spark widespread discourse surrounding this kind of "soft gambling" that was going unchecked within the video game indus

With many other massively popular streamers such as xQc and Trainwreckstv receiving similar deals, many claim that this kind of unchecked promotion of gambling services from people who are receiving huge sponsorship deals can be harmful to audiences, while also questioning the credibility of the showcased win rates of the gambling sites on stream. This kind of gambling was present on Twitch for several years, being a lingering controversy that was only recently addressed thanks to what is likely Twitch's most high-profile gambling controversy to d

Originally a Counter-Strike 1.1 map created by Chris "Narby" Auty and introduced on June 27th, 1999, Vertigo was a surprising addition to the map pool when it was added. On March 28th, 2019, the map was added to the active map pool in place of fan-favorite Cache as the map underwent renovations. This was surprising, but not all that unexpected. Up to this point, the player base was expecting a lot of the older maps to receive facelifts and come back better than ever, but few expected Cache's replacement to be Vert

Following intense subsequent pressure from the community on what was already a longstanding controversy, Twitch has banned most forms of gambling from the service , with the aforementioned crypto-gambling giant Stake.com being a named company that is no longer welcome on the streaming platform. This is enormous news for the company considering just how popular gambling streams are on the service, with streamers and fans on both sides of the argument continuing in intense deb