"The announcement is simple, if we hit 20,000 Premium members by the end of the year, we'll throw a massive open LAN tournament next summer and guarantee a total prize pot of at least $100,000. We'll support whatever games are part of Premium come next year, and if the community wants it, we'll make a point to throw one hell of a BYOC to go along with the main event.

At the time of this post, we're sitting pretty at just under 14,000 subscribers and we have over four months to make up the difference. For obvious reasons, we want this to happen just as much as everyone reading this does, so how do we make it work? To start, I've completely revamped the referral system which now features live rankings, free Premium accounts for the top 10 referrers, random monthly prizes for the top 100 referrers, as well as your ranking prominently displayed in your profile. As part of a special promotion for the LAN, we'll be flying out the #1 North American referrer to next summer's event -- I'll even pick you up personally if you're on the East coast.

On our end, we've spent weeks now agonizing over every detail of the new user process, have boosted our Steam group into the top 100 with over 40,000 members, continued to improve our search rankings, and have revamped the Premium Code system to help grow our international subscriber base. In the coming days we'll be unveiling a free game server network to feed into Premium, a guest pass code feature to help you refer more people and win, as well as spending some of our first dollars ever on actually advertising ESEA.

We're going all in on this. We have the resources to pull it off, the experience to make it world class, all that's left is four months of hard work, hand in hand with the community, to push this thing over the top -- something I'm extremely confident we'll able to do."