The Ins and Outs of CS:GO Tournaments: 2016–2018
CS:GO tournaments race to prominence
Since early on CS:GO tournaments became attention-grabbing events for esports fans. But the real uptick happened in 2016 when CS:GO tournaments received increased revenue from sponsorship and advertising sources. As a result, we’ve seen an influx of players which decided to take a shot at the esports career as dozens of new professional tournaments appeared with prize pools reaching millions of dollars. Gamers from all over the world have been keen on participating in CS:GO tournaments: Minors, Majors, and Premier events. With improved tournament prize pools it now became possible to have a sustainable career as an esports professional just like in soccer with top leagues, second and third-tier leagues that showed a clear pathway to the top.
CS:GO tournaments also became the go-to events for millions of esports fans. They are attracted by the best esports players, and an esports offline infrastructure improved greatly to the wide range of sponsors and advertisers. In this article we’ll focus on CS:GO competitive scene development in 2016–2018 and its prospects. We’ll give you the insights into the ways Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is changing the ways people feel about esports in general.
Progress to reach top paycheck: CS:GO tournaments tiers
CS:GO tournaments can take place offline, online or online with an offline playoff and are subdivided into Minors, Majors, and Premier events that differ by popularity and prize pools as can be seen below.
- Minor Tournaments. Nowadays every tournament has its own audience where people can root for their local team in Minor Tournaments that offer a smaller prize pool and have less prestige than Major Tournaments but still draw a high level of competition from young players aspiring to become professionals.
- Major Tournaments. Major Tournaments feature a larger prize pool and a good number of top-tier teams and are an event that hard-core esports fans should have attended by now at least once.
- Premier Tournaments. And finally, the top-tier Premier Tournaments is a mecca for everything esports-related. Many esports enthusiast tune-in to Twitch and watch them from the comfort of their homes. But these events take place offline and on big stadiums, so you can witness crowds that are in the tens of thousands as they support their favorite team in the stands.
The best CS:GO tournaments can offer an outstanding prize pool in hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars and feature the top teams from all over the world. They are commonly held by well-established organizers and are considered especially prestigious among the CS:GO community.
Numbers are better than words: CS:GO tournament stats
For the purposes of this article, we’ve only analyzed tournaments with prize pools greater than $50k that took place in 2016–2018. The exact numbers can be found in the chart below:
1) 95% of hundreds of Minor tournaments all over the world have relatively small prize pools of just several thousands of dollars. Still by participating and winning some of them can provide a decent foundation and financial support to further anyone’s esports career, and there are at least a few that have a prize pool of over $50k, as you can see below.
Overall Minors are a great place to kick-start your esports career, and some of the $50k minors have been won by the likes of Fnatic Academy. Of course, after succeeding in Minors some of the academy players were able to move up to the Fnatic team itself. Other teams that have won multiple Minors were able to sign lucrative sponsorship contracts and move up to the Majors. Some of the players were also able to sign a contract with a pro team and move from the “third-tier league” into the real pro realm.
2) The number of Major tournaments with a prize pool of over $50k showed only a slight increase of 1 tournament per year as can be seen below.
At the same time, the total prize pool increased greatly. Notably, the vast majority of the analyzed tournaments with a $50k+ prize pool in 2016–2017 had a prize pool of just $50–60k on average. In 2018 more than half of all Majors had a prize pool of over $100k and 1 tournament had a prize pool of $617k. That’s unheard of as the biggest prize pool for a Major was just $250k in 2017 and $195k in 2016.
This can be attributed to the increased interest in CS:GO tournaments by advertisers as the viewership of such tournaments steadily increases. For example, the V4 Future Sports Festival that took place in Hungary had a prize pool of 500k Euro and an audience of over 3.5M. Indeed, fewer people watch many of the Premier League soccer matches!
3) The overall number of the most exclusive Premier tournaments with a prize pool of over $50k has been slowly declining from 26 to 23 tournaments. This, in our opinion, can be attributed to a consolidation of tournaments and improve prize pools.
In 2016 Premier tournaments prize pools were starting at just $75k. That changed in 2017 when the minimum prize pool became $125k. With a few exceptions, the minimum prize pools in 2018 doubled to $250k. And every year there have been at least 4 tournaments with at least a $1M prize pool.
Have a look at the graphic below to see a progression of the number of all league tournaments with prize pools of over $50k year-on-year.
People are watching CS:GO tournaments in droves
The viewership is also skyrocketing. For example, the ELEAGUE Season 2 2016 has been watched almost 6M hours. In 2017 the ELEAGUE CS:GO Major has been watched 62M hours on Twitch — ten times as much as in the previous year. Next year, the trend continued with the ELEAGUE Major 2018 that has been watched over 100M hours on Twitch with over 60M unique views. In just a single year the viewership increased by 38M hours! This number becomes even more spectacular when we take into account that dozens of millions of esports fans have tuned in to watch just this single tournament.
Where does the money come from? Tournament and team sponsorships
And just like in traditional sports, many esports-related brands are sponsoring the industry. But many non-endemic brands are also getting interested to advertise to the millions of esports fans. This audience is ever increasing, as can be seen from that stats above, and has already reached hundreds of millions of people.
Below, we’ve compiled a list of top non-endemic sponsors list. It highlights some of the major companies that are attaching their names and dollars to competitive esports.
Fortum: This is a classic example of non-endemic brands entering the esports industry. It is a leading clean-energy company developing and offering solutions in electricity, heating, cooling, as well as solutions to improve resource efficiency. The company also provides services for the power generation industry and solutions for consumers so that they can be smarter in their energy choices. Fortum sponsored DreamHack CS:GO Masters Stockholm 2018 and had an intriguing display at the tournament start that you can check out for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cETt3xKsRc
Panzer Glass: The company is one of the leading screen protector brands in the market — providing screen protectors for a vast variety of smartphones, tablets and Apple Watches. And they sponsor the current #1 CS:GO esports team — Astralis.
Mountain Dew: The soda company sponsors several esports teams: Team Dignitas, Splyce, and SK Gaming. It also started an amateur tournament — the Mountain Dew League, that helps aspiring players make it to the pro scene.
PWC: PricewaterhouseCoopers is a multinational professional services network and is the second largest professional services firm in the world. The company is also a major sponsor of the Danish team Fragsters.
Audi: The German automaker began sponsoring CS:GO team Astralis in January 2017. They are among the most active automakers to enter the esports market and sponsor a professional CS:GO team.
Airbus: The aerospace corporation announced a sponsorship of the esports team Out of the Blue in October 2017, and it remains the only commercial jet manufacturer to support the industry.
Tinder: In 2018 the world-famous dating app decided to expand its footprint with the younger audience and attract the esports fans by supporting the recently relaunched MIBR team.
In May 2018, ELEAGUE added its first alcohol-brand sponsor: Kraken Black Spiced Rum. Other ELEAGUE non-endemic sponsors include Geico, Boost Mobile, Kellog’s Cheeze-It, and even the US Air Force that also sponsors the Cloud9 team.
As you can see the vast majority of top brands started jumping on the esports band very recently with the majority signing their sponsorship and advertising agreements in 2016–2017. As for 2018, we’re seeing a massive sponsorship uptrend from non-endemic brands that want to reach this particular audience.
While food companies like Pringles have had a presence in esports for years, fast food chains McDonald’s, KFC, and Hungry Jack’s have all recently partnered with large-scale esports events. The same goes for energy drinks giants like Red Bull and Monster Energy that have already partnered up with many esports organizations but expanded their agreements this year into long-term contracts with popular teams like Natus Vincere.
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