With last year’s Lucha Underground Austin Warfare event, South By Southwest set a pretty high bar in the department of Wrestlers Showing Up And Being Awesome. However, the annual spring festival of film, music, and interactive media looks like they’re trying to double down this year with their recent announcement regarding the 2017 SXSW Gaming Awards. Co-hosting the festivities will be none other than WWE’s resident gaming mastermind, Xavier Woods. If you’re unfamiliar with Woods’ qualifications, we’ll let the people at SXSW break it down for you:
“An avid gamer, Woods is also the host of his own YouTube gaming channel, UpUpDownDown, where he’s known by his gamer tag Austin Creed. The channel, which has secured nearly 1 million subscribers since launching last June, is the home to popular shows like Gamer Gauntlet and Superstar Savepoint, and continues to be a must-watch channel for gamers around the world.”
Here’s Woods with a message from the aforementioned UpUpDownDown, in which he doesn’t even attempt to hide his excitement a little bit.
Woods will share hosting duty with Twitch gaming personality Sonja Reid, who boasts a record-setting total of nearly 800,000 Twitch followers. If you want to cast your vote in any of the 23 categories for this year’s awards, you can do so now through February 10 over at IGN. And if you’re making the trek to Austin for SXSW and want to catch the awards in person, SXSW Gaming wristbands are still on sale! They jump up in price after Friday, so you may want to get on that sooner rather than later. Just a word of warning, though: Line up early. Few good things at SXSW come without a big line. This is coming from a guy who waited four hours in line for a free Smashing Pumpkins show in 2013, trust me.
