Hello travellers and welcome to the glittery fantasy landscape of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Here in the beautiful world of CS:GO we have a very healthy enviroment. Players get a good salary in order to make a living and there are not many unreliable organisations that could cause disturbance in our holy sanctum. We have experienced tournament organizers in Dreamhack and ESL to make good content, with first and foremost a remarkable prize pool, featuring the best teams in the world that creates for exciting competitions.

But those two, delivering majors and top-quality tournaments, could of course not carry this scene on their own, and that is also the reason why we make way for others who wish to create more regular content, sometimes with good LAN-finals on top of it (because LAN-finals is where the income for organisations are, ad revenue on a tuesday night isn’t that good). FACEIT, RoomOnFire, ESEA, GameShow, ESEC, Starladder, Fragbite and Hitbox are all organisations who tend to have something in plan for CS:GO at all times, and then of course we have the NA scence, not to be forgotten, with organisations such as once again, ESEA but also CEVO.

The result of this is that we can everyday enjoy a couple of games of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive of the highest quality on the evening, when we’ve come home from whatever occupation we might have.

What unfortunately people don’t realise is that our glittery fantasy landscape with daily CS:GO content is slowly starting to wither. “Hey, we’re breaking viewer records major after major!”, sure we are, but what are the consequences of becoming a top 3 game in e-sports? Well, more viewers, more attention, more money, better support from Valve, a bigger market, more businessmen, more companies looking to take advantage of the current state of e-sports, more people selling out, more people cashing out and suddenly this fantasy landscape of ours is nothing more than a wasteland with some people left asking themselves “What happened?”.

You might think I’m being a pessimist, and while I might not deny that statement entirely, I’d rather look on myself as realist. E-sports is still a new, fresh and modern market with a lot of potential and I can tell you all right now that we will eventually reach the promise land, it’s just a matter of time. We just have to learn from the past and slowly but surely walk the walk and get back on our feet every time we fall. I’m just trying to wake people up from the dream and make them realise that we’ve had oversaturation in e-sports before without no actions being taken, and we can’t allow this mistake of ours to happen over and over.

A League is a great idea — but not Leagues

If you look at european football there are many good domestic leagues with major tournaments such as Champions League, Europa League, the World Cup and European Championship between the best club and national teams in the world, and of course the domestic cup if the quality of chosen country is up to par (ie. FA Cup).

All you have to do is go and follow the league you like the most and you’re in! If you want you could even follow all of the top leagues and have somewhat of an idea of most clubs and players, but would you want to follow five leagues simultaneously with the same teams? Suddenly that Manchester United — Liverpool game has become more of a monthly thing rather than something yearly and with nature it becomes staler and less of a big deal. After a few seasons you might not even bother to watch anymore because what’s so special about it after all?

The idea of oversaturation is that the amount of content becomes so much that in the end the interest in competition drops off which means a lesser amount of viewers, less amount of money, less attention, less support from Valve, less businessmen investing and suddenly what was once one of the most played games on Steam is now considered as “ded gaem”.

The ideal situation for the longevity of the game itself would be to only have a single league. Tournaments are exciting due to the games always having something on the line, but having a league ensures consistent premier content featuring great games without the risk of feeling overwhelmed at the end of the day.

Multiple leagues doesn’t contribute anything to CS:GO as an e-sport, it will only slowly but surely just make us less interested in that NiP vs. Virtus.Pro game and be the beginning of the demise of CS:GO. More competitive games ensures better practice for teams, increasing the quality of the teams overall? More like teams not getting enough practice to improve their strategies ahead of important matches, and in the end it doesn’t matter how good the teams are if there is no interest in watching in the first place.

An LCS, WCS or TI is not the solution

While many consider these developer-sponsored leagues and tournaments to be the holy grail when it comes to increasing the longevity of the games, when in fact most of these systems put in place has in fact hurt the game more than it has contributed in the long run.

There is no denying that The International is a yearly tournament beyond words with the most amazing games and storylines with a massive prize pool and coverage we’ve never seen in e-sports before (except for Brood War in Korea during the golden years it had or perhaps League of Legends in Asia). But with such a well-established franchise as Dota, with an incredibly dedicated community, that received a massive amount of developer support from Valve with compendiums and tickets, you can’t help but question, could it had been more than what it is?

Surely people will argue that Dota 2 has not in fact already reached the end of the road, but the symptons has been apparent for quite a while and it almost feels like Dota 2 currently lies in hibernation after TI4, the question is will it wake up? TI3 was the tournament of tournaments and people thought there was no matching it, despite that, TI4 turned out to have the biggest prize pool ever in e-sports, coverage on ESPN and over 20 million unique viewers, but am I wrong to say that TI4 in the end didn’t quite reach the expectations many had?

The faults of having such a big major tournament as The International are apparent, the rest of the year becomes uninteresting in comparison and there are never really enough majors that comes close in order to grasp that amazing feeling of watching a great tournament. Teams always plan for the next TI rather than thinking short-term and even worse is the fact that the prize pool distribution doesn’t help the scene at all, the winning team gets a huge sum of money while half the teams in this year’s edition only got to share between 2% of the total prize pool. Is that really the proper way to fund a scene?

WCS almost faced the opposite problem of The International in that WCS pretty much oversaturated the scene by itself. WCS may not have been the reason behind the decline of viewership in Starcraft II, but it certainly didn’t help Starcraft II to get back up on it’s feet again.

Blizzard shut the door for other tournament organizers as they got minimal space to work with in the scene and with a new format, it ultimately became the end of the legendary league known as GSL. GSL truly displayed the best of the best fighting it out versus each other and following the foreigners road to glory was the most exciting thing that existed in terms of Starcraft II. WCS new format of the league made it unreasonable to travel to South Korea and practice as well as compete.

ESL and Dreamhack continued to hold tournaments frequently, and still are, but the fact of the matter is that hearing the name WCS in everything Starcraft II related, everyday, ultimately hurt the scene to the point where it is today.

So then there’s only the dreadful model of LCS left to discuss. I’m not heavily invested in League of Legends, I’d rather consider myself a fan of e-sports more than anything else (ignoring the biggest e-sport game, go me!), but even I’ve heard how the model of a strict, developer-run scene is causing instability.

Competition has always been considered good in order to up the standards. For example Twitch are unlikely to raise their CPM if there’s no other lucrative streaming site to stream from and I’d doubt e-sport would have developed so quickly in terms of quality if it wasn’t for the constant battle between Dreamhack and ESL.

Despite the reputation game developers have earned themselves in making horrible e-sport decisions, Riot has done a good job in terms of ensuring the longevity of League of Legends. A scene can’t be perfect, existing without it’s faults, but in the end it feels like Riot tried so hard to patch up those faults that they simply became self-destructive and caused more disturbance than harmony. Drama about different rules and how admins from Riot has acted arguably incorrectly according to the community has caused a lot of uncertainity regarding whether they’re fit to run this show or not. Their TV-production is certainly the best in e-sports, but running a league is not all about the viewers’ look on it.

LCS is what it is, nothing more, nothing less, but is that really the way to go? Aren’t wild beasts more exciting to follow when they roam free rather than observing them in a zoo?

So then what is the solution?

Well, there is no real clear solution to this problem, what would help CS:GO would of course be tournament and league organisers saying “Oh, sorry for cluttering your schedule with more games! We’re out!”, but in a medium where everyone just sees potential dollars in their pockets, that’s not going to happen. So instead of the organisers giving up, we’d essentially have to force them out of this space.

As seen in the gorgeous image I compiled above, NiP is one of the teams participating in almost all tournaments and leagues. Now the question is why do NiP participate in so many tournaments? The simple answer is money. NiP didn’t pull out of ESEA Invite because they felt overwhelmed, they pulled out because they didn’t see themselves making any profit with their bad results in the league.

As a professional e-sport player your monthly salary is pretty much nothing compared to having a regular nine to five job (then again, League of Legends may be an exception here). I’d take a rough guess (that might be inaccurate) that depending on what organisation you play for, a CS:GO professional earns about $750-$2.000 per month, not counting tournament winnings or money from streaming. That’s a wage that in most EU countries is impossible to live on if you have your own apartment, paying your own bills etc. Participating in tournaments and fighting for that extra prize money is a necessity if you’re to not have a job beside your e-sport career.

Instead of participating in 4–5 leagues and a bunch of tournaments in order to survive, teams and their players need to set higher standards and requirements. Instead of trying to win that necessary money it should be in it’s nature that tournament and league organisers offer that money, and potentially travel and vacancy, in the first place before a game has even been played. This is something that fnatic has already started with, as noticed when they initially refused to compete in ESEA S17 due to a disagreement regarding prize pool distribution and perks. Even if ESEA and fnatic came to an agreement at a later stage, there’s positives to draw from this incident.

In the Premier League you get a share of the TV-money regardless if you end up on 1st or 20th place, this should be the norm for e-sports as well.

A continuation of fnatic’s behavior from teams will result in fewer tournament and league organisers being able to attract the top teams, which will then itself lead to fewer matches between the very best teams, and in the end we get more excited for those matches when they eventually happen. Instead of teams being forced to play tournaments in order to survive, we now have a scene where teams don’t have to worry about sustainability.

It sounds cruel to ditch those who doesn’t necessarily have the money, who want to help out but doesn’t have the dollars required, but the fact still stands that with CS:GO still growing and a more professional and demanding enviroment is necessary. If you really want to support CS:GO with your money I’d say go fund tournaments that are aimed towards the semi-pro teams. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that the only real reason that professional sports teams have youth teams or the fact that there are college leagues in the U.S is because there is a value in having those. Whether the value comes from discovering and ultimately selling that really talented player, getting handed money from associations, or increasing the attractiveness of a college is irrelevant. Money is always first prioritization.

There’s always going to be people that want your money, you just have to adjust yourself to the audience interested.

E-sports can no longer be considered a cute hobby

In an interview from 2013, with the famous Dota 2-host and The GD Studio CEO, James “2GD” Harding, Duncan “Thorin” Shields asked what Harding’s view was on the longevity of League of Legends as a premier e-sports title. To sum his answer up, Harding basically answered that a regular e-sports title normally has a lifespan of roughly five years, sometimes longer, before another game gets released with flashier mechanics and functions, a number that sounds reasonable at least to me.

What will eventually happen unless we stop this oversaturation of content is that those estimated years that CS:GO has to live as a premier e-sports title will start to decrease due to burnt out players and viewers. If we really care for CS:GO as an e-sport title and we want it to survive for as long as possible we need to protect it from being consumed as quickly as it currently is. If we manage to maintain the game’s health successfully we might even see CS:GO modernise itself to adjust to future e-sports titles, ensuring a longer era of the game.

E-sports has for a long time been considered this industry where money to make a living is uncommon, but with the inflation of viewers, prize money and sponsors we need to take advantage of the situation we’re currently in to ensure ourselves a future. The times of looking upon e-sports as a cute hobby is over, and with that in mind we need to lift the veil and continue our climb to the top.

Jonathan “Re1nforce” Larsson,
@re1nforce