Now it’s time for number two on my lists for the biggest triumphs and failures in ten years of Counter Strike. Let me quickly recap where we are in the list:

Triumphs:
#5 The max round game type and format standardization
#4 The Pre-World Tour CPL
#3 Player / Developer Interaction

Failures:
#5 Counter Strike Source
#4 The Post World Tour CPL
#3 Prize Money

You can find the articles talking about these here:

Part Three (#3’s)
Part Two (#4’s)
Part One (#5’s)

Now on to number two:

Triumph #2
Steam

I have my issues with Steam. I hated how the game played when the game was upgraded from 1.5 to 1.6, the log in problems, how hard it was to LAN with the need for a net connection, and so on. However, I’m pretty sure Steam saved Counter Strike.

How so? There are really three reasons.

The first is that Counter Strike drew and continues to draw new people to steam. Therefore, Valve has no reason to shut off Counter Strike. In fact some companies like EA scrap master servers for aging games making them unplayable making this a big reason why Steam was such a great development for the CS community. This point is slightly chicken or the egg in that without CS there would be no steam and without steam CS’ staying power might not be all that certain.

The second is that Steam revolutionized the distribution of games online. While digital downloads and other methods of downloading legitimate full version copies of games existed before Steam, the ease and security that steam offers is really quite good. Now a whole library of games is available to you from your computer desk. Do you live in a remote area and have to drive an hour to a game store? Buy it off steam! Do you have a crappy computer and want to play some cheap older games? No problem Steam has you covered!

Besides improving game distribution, Steam drastically reduces the overhead in the actual sale of video games. Instead of splitting the profits with a publisher, the development house can put the game up for purchase on steam only paying Valve’s fee. This means no sunken CD costs, manual costs, or box costs. It also increases a game’s long term profitability because keeping a product on steam indefinitely doesn’t steal shelf space like keeping Counter Strike in BestBuy for ten years. This means that games targeted at a smaller audience, like competitive gamers, can actually thrive via steam. Think of it this way: the last commercial game tailored to the competitive gamer was Quake III released in 1999.

My third and final point is that Steam is a marketing machine. Combined with in-game ads that are part and parcel of the Steam experience and you have the potential for a viable income stream for niche games. When Counter Strike was king shit in terms of units sold, I doubt anyone was evaluating their business plans. However, after World of Warcraft everyone and their mother reevaluated their business plans. WoW has dwarfed everything else and now what numbers make a profitable game are judged based on what WoW did.

What ways are there for FPS games to remain competitive in terms of profitability to a MMO? Subscriptions won’t work when users are paying for their own servers and if episodic content worked we would be on Half-Life2 episode 20 about now. The only option is in-game ads or ads very close to your gaming experience. This means either placing ads inside the game, on the game client, or both. Every time you launch steam you’re hit with a new offer for a game, your loading screen has an advertisement and then in-game with Valve’s brief foray into billboards on dust2.

Is it ideal? Hell no. I just want competitive games to thrive rather than wither on the vine that is corporate game making.

Failure #2
Championship Gaming Series

I feel kind of cheap putting the Championship Gaming Series at number two on my list. It’s way too easy for me to bash on these guys, and most of what has been said about them has been repeated ad nausem for years now. So instead of the usual attack lines, I’m going to talk about the damage they did to the community.

I have to admit, I was a fucking fan boy in 2006. The first CGI happened that year in 2006 and I went with GotFrag there to cover it. I was blown away by everything, especially how they treated the players. The people in charge were new to the scene, but seemed to know they didn’t know anything (which is a really good thing … because those people learn and ask for help). To top it off it was the closest thing I had seen to a Korean gaming event ever. When I interviewed Steven Roberts at CES in January of 2007 I felt like Chris Matthews getting a tingle up my leg.

Yet looking back I was naïve and the worm would eventually turn. I stayed supportive, because my buddies were getting salaries to play Counter Strike. Yet despite everyone’s best attempts, the CGS had plotted its own course and their executives thought they knew better than their core audience.

The damage they did to the Counter Strike scene is unmistakable. CGS destroyed every top American 1.6 team, and set back their sponsorship chase by years. Instantly after the draft complexity, 3D, JMC, EG, and Pandemic were all gone. United 5 and zEx were picked apart by CGS teams who needed to replace players. In one fell swoop we lost SEVEN teams. The air was sucked completely out of the room for 1.6. Sponsorship opportunities dried up, and teams like Pandemic focused on games other than Counter Strike to remain viable.

What we were left with wasn’t bad. Turmoil and eMg both rose to the challenge, but before these teams fell off the face of the earth would anyone have picked them to be the best North America had? No one would.

Only during CGS’ second season did the talent drain slow down as people realized that playing in the CGS was a pipe dream. The concept of the taxi teams fell apart, the online league didn’t offer anything other than the CGS name, no more teams were being added to the league, and being drafted was still a remote possibility. Then the second season of CGS shattered the teams we had come to love, and the jig was up.

Not only had CGS ripped the best teams out of our scene but then they proceeded to destroy them to fit their own twisted concept of fairness. The effects are still felt today … the only team to come out of CGS and play 1.6 was coL.

Not only did CGS’ demise directly hurt the scene by butchering its teams, it also impacted the business aspects of American eSports. It sucked up sponsor money from teams and events leading to a complete lack of any North American PC events since 2006. Plus, now people are gun shy. If DirecTV can’t make me money, how can these smaller groups do it?

While the impact in Europe was minimal at best, NA vs. EU has always been the best storyline in eSports and the CGS stole that from us.