The University of Bath emerged the victors in the GameBritannia UK university tournament last weekend, beating Cambridge 3-0 in the final.
They were playing in The Heritage Dota 2 LAN finals which took place at London’s Student Central venue from January 30th to 31st.
16 university teams have been battling it out over the past few months for a place in the finals, but it was Cambridge, LSE, Bath and Nottingham who made it to the final four to participate in the weekend’s playoffs.
On the Saturday, the first best-of-three semi-final saw Cambridge beat LSE 2-1, while Bath knocked out Nottingham 2-1 in the other semi.
In Sunday’s best-of-five grand final, Bath secured three straight wins against Cambridge to make them the overall winners.
Bath won a trophy, five Honor7 smartphones, five Nightly MSI motherboards and £500, while runners-up Cambridge received five Honor C3 smartphones and five SteelSeries Apex mechanical keyboards.
Other universities that took part included the University of Glasgow, UCL, Oxford University, University of Birmingham, Warwick, KCL, Southampton University, Birmingham City University, Liverpool John Moores, University of Manchester, Lancaster University and QMUL.
The entire tournament was live-streamed on Twitch’s front page in the UK and it drew more than 1,000 unique viewers, with more than 600 attending in person.
“Our goal is to be able to create a consistent end-to-end eSport tournament experience for students who want to compete in gaming and represent their universities in the UK.”
The event was backed by eight sponsors including Honor, MSI UK, Student Central, Twitch, AverMedia, Wirecast, Box.co.uk and SteelSeries, plus it featured YouTuber Pyrion Flax as a special guest.
Amy Yu, co-founder and CEO of GameBritannia, told eSports News UK: “There’s a growing enthusiasm for gaming within UK universities – and we started GameBritannia with the intention to host a series of intercollegiate LAN tournaments through grassroots marketing.
“Our goal is to be able to create a consistent end-to-end eSport tournament experience for students who want to compete in gaming and represent their universities in the UK.”
GameBritannia has a team of four: Amy, Eric Keen (the other co-founder), Jimmy Pan (community manager) and Mitch Zhang (marketing and logistics). Amy looks after the business side – sponsors, sales, pitching, organising, finance and HR – while Eric works on the game selection, tournament structure, production, Twitch stream and so on.
You might be thinking that GameBritannia is a rival to the National University Esports League (NUEL), what with it running a national championship for Dota 2 like the NUEL does for League of Legends, Hearthstone and CSGO. However, Amy says otherwise.
“I would say GameBritannia is slightly different to NUEL model, as our goal would be to bring a consistent tournament experience to university players,” she explains. “I think what NUEL does and what [its founder] Josh Williams has achieved is amazing.”
GameBritannia is currently working on another UK eSports tournament (featuring Dota 2 and CSGO) due to take place during March or April. It will be a slightly smaller event than The Heritage, this time with universities from London competing against one another.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
Yep this is some g stuff