“ESL started out with Counter-Strike more than fifteen years ago,” says Ralf Reichert, managing director of ESL.
Let that sink in for a while. Fifteen years. That’s a long time in any industry, let alone the nascent eSports scene. By comparison, League of Legends is less than six years old, while Dota 2 is even younger.
It’s only fitting then, that Valve’s shooter gets a competition worthy of the twin titans of eSports today, and it’s got just that with the recent announcement of the ESL ESEA Pro League. With a seven figure prize pot, the league promises to offer up the regular, sustainable season format that Counter-Strike has needed for all these years and should help elevate the eSport to the same levels as Dota and LoL.
“Now, many years later, we are extremely humbled to be in a position where we can pioneer the first regular US$500,000 Counter-Strike tournament together with ESEA” says Reichert.
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ESL were running Counter-Strike tournaments in the last millennium, making it the oldest major eSport out there. Yet despite its storied history the latest version of CS, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, has never managed to quite match the major MOBAs in terms of prize pools. While CS:GO tournaments regularly pulls in huge viewing figures, Valve’s grassroots approach to eSports means it lacks the schedule of its rivals. The ESL ESEA Pro League is the perfect solution to this problem and something that should have been done years ago.
Take competitive League of Legends, which shows regularity really helps build hype. Riot has proved with the LCS that a regular season building up to a major LAN event at the end is one of, if not the, best ways of maintaining a stable pro scene that keeps fans consistently entertained. The majority of LCS broadcasts pull in 100,000 or more viewers on the English Twitch stream alone, positioning it almost always as the most watched game on the streaming service. The main reason for this is the regularly scheduled broadcasts. During the LCS season fans know exactly when games are taking place making it easy to jump on Twitch and see a high quality game. It’s the same reason the football season goes on for nine months of the year, and major league baseball teams play hundreds of games each year.
Until now the opposite has been true for Counter-Strike. Tournaments have rarely had a consistent schedule, meaning a casual fan on Twitch may find days with no major events happening and thus nothing to watch. The ESL ESEA Pro League promises a minimum of three streams per week for the majority of the tournament, all of which will start at the same time. This consistency means viewers will always know when to tune in and the regular broadcasts should keep them tuning in throughout the tournament, which will hopefully see the viewer numbers grow over the next couple of months.
But it’s not just the viewers who will benefit from the regular schedule, the pro players will too. Having regular league games means that they will constantly be playing against the highest quality of opponent in a serious competitive environment.
Scrims and training games are great for certain things such as trying out new tactics but what players really want to be doing is playing in matches that mean something, against quality opponents. With the current system there can sometimes be weeks where a team might not have any tournament matches lined up, and the next they could have multiple matches every day. The consistency of the ESL ESEA Pro League will offer up more regular matches for the pros to play, keeping schedules manageable and interesting.
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Of course it won’t just be the regular matches that pleases the players and their organisations, the $1m prize pool committed for 2015 is also a massive positive for all involved. Sure it’s still a long way from the $10m plus prize pool of The International 4 and LoL’s World Championships also had more on the line, but it is by quite a way, the largest amount committed to a single event in Counter-Strike history (even if they have announced that the $1m will be split across two seasons this year).
ESL and ESEA have already committed to increasing the prize pool of subsequent events in the coming years and it wouldn’t be surprising to see other tournament organisers follow suit with bigger prize pools. While not all the effects of increasing prize pools have been positive on the likes of Dota it is hard to argue that massive prize pools haven’t helped grow the game and the competitive scene around it.
Another of the leagues promises is that the tournament organisers will cover all travel expenses for the offline LAN events. While this sounds like something that should be standard across all eSports it is unfortunately noticeably absent from many events in the CS:GO scene. If a team themselves pays to travel to a LAN it becomes a big risk, especially if there isn’t a guarantee of receiving some prize money but as soon as the organiser agrees to fund travel all risk goes away and there is literally no reason not to attend the LAN. Not only does it reduce the risk of teams not wanting to attend due to expenses it also means that players and teams will have more of the prize pool to spend as they see fit. While one tournament covering travel expenses won’t change things overnight, an event as big as this doing it will certainly make other tournament organisers take notice, especially if the league turns out to be the success that it is positioned to be.
The ESL ESEA Pro League is being split in two. There is one European division and one American division, which is perhaps the best decision that the tournament organisers have made thus far. It’s fair to say that right now there aren’t many American teams that can really stand toe to toe with the European powerhouses of Fnatic, TSM, NiP and others. But by giving them their own league it offers a great way for the American teams to grow, and win some serious cash before they face off against the European teams again. Giving the American teams the chance to play against each other will allow them to develop their play style and hopefully come up with some new ideas that will surprise the Europeans next time they meet, making the matches that little bit more exciting.
There are still (at the time of writing) a few key pieces of information about the ESL ESEA Pro League missing, such as just how the prize pool will be distributed across the teams and how exactly the LAN finals will work. But the information that we do know makes the event sound like it has the potential to be the best thing to happen to competitive CS:GO since the introduction of the majors. It has taken over 15 years to happen, but now Counter-Strike has a tournament that can potentially elevate it to become one of the biggest eSports in the world.
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