Tomorrow, March 24, marks another milestone in Philippine gaming history as The Nationals, the first-ever eSports franchise-based model league in Southeast Asia, formally begins its inaugural season.
From the confines of local computer shops to the big stage, eSports has come a long way in the country but nothing as groundbreaking as the establishment of a franchise league.
Think PBA (Philippine Basketball Association) but for games.
Finally, we gamers can tell all those doubters and naysayers: “We told you so.”
For how many times have you heard people say that gaming is nothing but a “waste of time”? With the establishment of a professional league, gamers can finally say they are not just following their dream but also pursuing a career.
The five inaugural teams are PLDT-Smart Omega, Cignal Ultra Warriors, Bren Epro, HF Emperors and Suha-XCTN Punishers. The sixth team, STI, will be joining the league in June.
The teams will be competing in three of the biggest and most popular games in the country: Dota 2 on PC, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang on Mobile and Tekken 7 on PS4.
The five teams will participate in all three games spanning March all the way to October of this year, with all games played at the Gariath Concepts Studio, guaranteeing an exhilarating experience to the fans watching firsthand. STI will be fielding its team after the Dota 2 competition.
Each of the contested games will have two conferences in the first season. Each conference will feature a double round-robin group stage and single-elimination playoffs, where winners and the top performers per conference will advance to a season finale later on in the year.
The Nationals Commissioner Ren Vitug is optimistic the league will be able to provide a platform where talents can be nurtured. “I have witnessed many athletes gleaming with skill and potential drop out of the scene because the infrastructure was not there to support them. There are so many external factors that prevent them from being the best that they can be.”
Not only will the players be equipped with an adequate training facility, but they will also be serviced by a support group vital to their development as athletes. Included in the league-mandated team personnel are managers, coaches, fitness trainers, nutritionists, and counselors, to name a few. Enforcing this on a league has never been done in the country, and the league believes it is a necessary step for athletes to stay on top of the demanding nature of the sport, likewise conforming to international standard.
“A lot of people think that being an eSports athlete is easy, but players train as long and as hard as athletes would in traditional sports,” Vitug said. “It is highly competitive, and the dynamics are usually very unstable and ever-changing.”
Being a franchise-based league, The Nationals guarantees the continued existence of teams, providing stability and continuity for the local eSports calendar. Now, both athletes and teams have a more actionable goal that does not involve them going all or nothing on international events.
With this in place, they can actually have long-term planning and continuity, something not yet present in Philippine eSports.
“The stage is set, competition is ready, game faces on. If we do it right, it’s going to make a huge impact. These teams are participating for one huge undertaking, to build the right infrastructure in order to showcase the Filipino eSport athlete,” says The Nationals President Kevin Chung.
“We want to show the world that this in no longer a game. We are now e-games, we are eSports,” Chung says with passion.
The Nationals comes at the perfect timing with the Games and Amusements Board (GAB) recognizing eSports as an official sport last July 2017. This November, the 30th Southeast Asian Games hosted in the Philippines will feature eSports as an official medal sport. All three game titles in The Nationals will be featured in the upcoming SEA Games. This guarantees to be a highlight attraction for a country with 70 million of its population being online and 47 million of those being gamers.
Big name corporations are starting to invest in eSports today on a global scale, and it is not surprising considering the reach and attention it gets. For The Nationals, PayMaya will be the league’s Official Digital Payments Partner.
Rounding out the pioneering partners are The Nationals Official TV broadcast partners ESPN5 through 5Plus on free TV, and Cignal TV through eGG Network, and One Sports on Pay TV. Livestreaming on social media will, likewise, be provided by the league.
NO REASON TO BAN HUAWEI
WE are just a few days away from the launch of the Huawei P30, one of the most highly anticipated smartphones of the year, yet Huawei continues to be in the limelight for an altogether different and more controversial reason.
Over the past few months, the US has been exerting pressure on other nations that are considering using Huawei equipment in building its fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless networks.
Huawei, an employee-owned company, has strongly denied that it has ever spied for the Chinese government or would consider doing so.
According to reports, United States’s Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell even wrote a letter to Germany’s economy minister warning that the US would limit its intelligence sharing with the country if it lets Chinese vendors like Huawei participate in building its 5G networks. Grenell argued that secure communications are vital for defense, and companies like Huawei could undermine that security.
But the US campaign versus Huawei seems to be losing rather than gaining support. The UK, Germany, India and the United Arab Emirates are among the countries who are unlikely to back the American effort to entirely ban Huawei from building their 5G networks. The UK, for instance, shared the United States’s concerns, but argued that the security risks can be managed by closely scrutinizing the company and its software. Germany, on the other hand, uses Huawei equipment for its 4G network and needs the company for 5G to make it backward compatible, and selecting another vendor might set the country back two years.
Some believe the US is doing it out of fear that it cannot manipulate Huawei— not fear of Chinese spying, but rather that Huawei will make US spying more difficult. Meanwhile, others say it is all about business as China has already invested far more in 5G technology than the US, and eliminating Huawei is one way to catch up. And for an issue that is really quite technical, isn’t it odd that the US has yet to present actual facts and, more important, technical evidence against Huawei?
So is there any reason to ban Huawei in the Philippines?
One senior Philippine official said Huawei is “not a security threat to the Philippines” and that the country has no reason to ban the use of its equipment.
In an interview with reporters, Assistant Secretary Allan Cabanlong of the Cybersecurity and Enabling Technologies of the Philippine Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said there is no scientific basis to support the allegations that Huawei is engaged in espionage activity. “Right now, there is no evidence that Huawei is conducting espionage in the Philippines,” Cabanlong said, adding that “the Philippines cannot block something without any scientific or technical evidence.”
Cabanlong responded to questions on whether the Philippines should follow the United States’s call to stop the use of Huawei equipment, especially its 5G technology, alleging it is embedded with backdoors that will allow the Chinese government to spy or provide Chinese government access to the data that flows through its equipment.
He also noted that the US has yet to share any evidence to prove its allegations against Huawei.
“If the US has evidence, then they should share it to other countries to prove it. As of now, there’s none, only information. They can share it with us through our interior channel so we could verify and have reason to block or ban Huawei.”
Because of the lack of evidence, Cabanlong says there’s no cause for alarm for Huawei—but that doesn’t mean his department and the DICT isn’t doing anything. “Rest assured, we will continue to conduct due diligence and monitor everything—not only with Huawei but all other contractors and equipment makers. We will examine and evaluate each one accordingly.”
He also detailed some of the new cyber-security measures that will be deployed by DICT to ensure the data coming in and out of the country are protected.
“This project is very important in our efforts to conduct due diligence on cyber security. We are building the platform so that we can test everything, especially if it’s a government project because we want to assure the public that the systems we are using, whether it came from China, the US or any other countries, are tested and safe to use,” said Cabanlong.
Cabanlong is also one of the pioneers of cyber security in the country and the author of the Philippines’s officially adopted cyber-security road map.
In 2017, the Philippines ranked No. 39th from among 193 countries in the Global Cybersecurity Index. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) assessed the cyber-security efforts of 193 countries based on the following factors: legal; technical; organizational; capacity building; and cooperation.
The ranking shows the Philippines is already in the “maturing” stage, which is the second of three stages wherein the first stage is the “initiating” and the final is the “leading.” Furthermore, this means the Philippines has already developed programs and initiatives to work on its cyber-security efforts.
Cabanlong said that with the National Cybersecurity Plan 2022 in place, we should expect the ranking of the Philippines to be higher, and he believes we are on a par with our Asean neighbors when it comes to cyber security.
The NSCP 2022 was created in recognition of the “urgency” of protecting every single user of the Internet among Filipinos, the Philippines’s critical information infrastructure (CII), government networks, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and also big businesses and corporations.