Sunsetting ESEA, improving interfaces, and how EFG is preparing for a post-franchise landscape

Ever since Valve announced the transition from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to CS2, fans and players wondered alike how the landscape of professional Counter-Strike would change. Late in 2023, Daniel "Scoobster" Khurgin interviewed two ESL FACEIT Group (EFG) employees to learn more about how the transition looked from their side and what the TO and platform hope to accomplish in the near to distant future. To speak on behalf of ESL, we spoke to EFG's Shaun Clark, Senior Director of Game Ecosystems, Counter-Strike, and on behalf of FACEIT, Fabio Floris, President, Digital Platforms.

These interviews were conducted on November 28th and December 1st, 2023.

Shaun Clark, Senior Director of Game Ecosystems, Counter-Strike

What is ESL’s vision for underdeveloped regions with the release of CS2? We’ve seen LANs in China to build up the APAC region, does ESL view these areas as growth opportunities?

Our goal is to support Counter-Strike in remaining the leading esport on the planet. To achieve this, we want to share our passion and work with as many people as possible, wherever they come from, so that they can experience the magic of this wonderful game.

For as long as I can remember, Intel® Extreme Masters has stood as a global product within esports, providing opportunities not just to the larger regions, but the undeveloped as well. This is still true today and how we will continue to shape the product moving forward.

And as we look forward, the APAC region is going to be an important opportunity for us to capitalize on in order to achieve our goal. We were actively growing at a rapid speed within China before the global pandemic took hold, and unfortunately, we haven’t been back since 2019. However, we are very excited to restart that journey in 2024 as we return with Intel Extreme Masters in April.

For the longest time we’ve heard that sponsors do not like being associated with Counter-Strike due to the terrorist naming scheme and violence shown. Do you think anything has changed with regards to sponsorships for Counter-Strike 2?

Without speaking on behalf of other businesses, there is continued interest and growth of brands wanting to be associated with video games - no matter the game. The more mature our space becomes, the larger the understanding of who we are and what we stand for becomes known, and with that, the continued acceleration of interest. So I wouldn’t necessarily marry your question specifically to Counter-Strike 2.

Esports is about competition, teamwork, and community regardless of the game. We’ve made a point to be a clear ambassador for our industry and to share our beliefs on why including the right esports or gaming strategy is key to any forward-thinking business.

As is in the news recently, esports organizations are finding it more difficult to find the same investment in the form of sponsors as compared to just a few years ago, forced to cut costs in this “esports winter”. Has that affected ESL’s ability to find sponsorships at all, and if so, is ESL looking to find different avenues for revenue?

We are very fortunate to be partnered with some amazing brands such as Intel, DHL, Monster Energy, and many more who believe in our mission and have supported us for many years. Outside of our brand relationships, and very similar to others in this industry, we are constantly looking for methods to help us create a sustainable business so that we can consistently provide back to the community.

IEM Sydney was a very well-put-together event with minimal technical issues despite the full release of Counter-Strike 2 coming out extremely recently. What do you attribute that success to?

Firstly, thank you. We worked very hard behind the scenes to achieve this, it was our core focus going into IEM Sydney to ensure a smooth transition and experience for players, teams and fans.

Our team is world-class and incredibly passionate about Counter-Strike. They are fans of the game and they wanted nothing more than to showcase the game to the world without any technical hindrance. We knew that if we could achieve this, the amazing energy that the Australian community provides would do the rest for us and we left Australia feeling very happy with what we were able to provide back to our community and game.

We’ve seen ESL partner with local LANs like Insomnia in the UK. Could ESL partner with LANs like Fragadelphia to bring ESL Challenger League or other events to LAN?

Yes, especially recently this has become more of an interest to us to pursue. We have already started to work on developing an affiliate strategy with the goal of elevating partnered tournaments by giving them an official ESL Pro Tour (EPT) status and feeding these tournaments into our global tournament circuit.

We believe that local tournament organizers are in most cases much better equipped to serve their respective communities than we are as a global tournament organizer. What drives us here is the success of the overarching ecosystem, if the game and community is thriving, so will we be better positioned to continue doing what we do at the highest level.

As someone who worked on broadcast, do you think there’s any room to innovate in the broadcast industry? We’ve seen BLAST create BLAST.tv to bring viewers to their own streaming system. What do you think of that?

Without speaking to them on their strategy, I assume that BLAST.tv is ultimately an alternative method to generate incremental revenue while providing a service back to the community.

I respect BLAST in many ways, especially with their stance on providing maximum entertainment value within their product. We’ve learned a lot from them over the years, and I think it’s important that as an industry we continue to dive into these innovative ideas.

With Valve putting an end to partnerships on the horizon in 2025, what is ESL doing to prepare for when events like ESL Pro League don’t have de facto partner teams? Do you have an idea for the number of slots split between invites and open qualifiers?

The majority of our ecosystem will remain unchanged as there are only minor tweaks we need to make because of how similar our tournament footprint is to Valve's vision - for example, IEM Cologne & IEM Katowice are 100% merit-based competitions. Therefore the community can expect a very similar system to what we have today in 2025.

When it comes to ESL Pro League (EPL), we are currently happy with the role that the product plays in connecting the successful teams from tier-2 tournaments with the already successful tier-1 teams. For 2023 we increased the size of the tournament from 24 participating teams to 32 to lean into this logic to maximize opportunities for those aspiring teams.

We haven’t dived into the exact details yet such as the slot distribution but one change that we’ve already implemented as we head into 2024 is the reduction from five to three weeks - we are tightening up the schedule in order to complete the tournament quicker allowing more teams and other tournament organizers to operate.

On that note, what do you think about Valve removing the partnership system entirely?

We are happy with the direction, especially as it disrupts very little in how we operate today. Opening up our tournaments and incentive programs towards more teams can only be seen as positive. We’ve spent a lot of time with Valve, especially over the last 9 months working together to ensure that Counter-Strike continues to succeed and has a bright future for many more years to come.

Fabio Floris, President, Digital Platforms

What was the main reasoning behind combining ESEA with FACEIT?

Ever since the merge the communication with the community has been for the intention to merge the capabilities of the technologies across our products. Simply put, when you concentrate your activity on one place, you’re likely to deliver something better for the users. This was the plan we expected to do across 2 or 3 years. The announcement of CS2 dramatically changed everything, and so the plan became two months.

In two months, we basically had to migrate the team leagues content and the concept of team leagues to FACEIT, simply because unfortunately, the ESEA tech stack was not too well maintained at that point to maintain and adapt for CS2. To change everything on ESEA to work for CS2 would have been a very, very long process. Since we know how important team leagues are as a backbone for the competitive scene, we really didn’t want to run the risk of going six, seven months without playing a single match for team leagues while waiting to rewrite the overall tech stack behind ESEA. So, we decided to rush, since this was rushed, the migration of this content and format to FACEIT, appreciating the fact that the product was definitely not designed for this, and is still today not where it should be for that specific experience. But, we preferred to not run the risk of having a long time without leagues.

When you stop for six, seven months, or any long time, there’s a high risk you start to lose traction. You start to have teams losing momentum, et cetera, which is a risk we didn’t want to run. So, that was the decision. Now, it’s really about going through the list of the issues we need to solve from an experience standpoint, and week after week making sure we start to go in a direction where first, we go to a feature parity with what was more or less the same experience as before, to something that we believe is going to be even better.

What specifically are you looking to improve on?

For team leagues in particular, on one side, the general UI/UX. As we said, that product was not ready in the optimal way. The user journey, use cases that you have, to have information to find your matches, et cetera. There’s an overall UI/UX improvement that’s one of the main focuses today.

On the other side there are small features to improve the quality of life for spectators and players, talking about making GOTV accessible to every single match without going through any manual requests. We’re talking about dramatically improving the scheduling process. Today it’s a pain point just for a team to reschedule a match. They’re used to a certain process and now there’s a different one. We’re trying to replicate a better system for that.

A big topic, of course, is finding data and historical data about teams, leagues, et cetera. I know that in December there is already an update that will make the content on team pages better. Overall, there is still a lot that we can do there.

Then there is one topic that is connected to team leagues but is overall an area that we’re working on for the FACEIT service, which was supposed to be our core focus for 2023, but CS2 forced us to change the plan completely. We’re invested in bringing in a reshuffle of the UI/UX, where among other things, an objective for our products is facilitating connection between players.

In a competitive pug, for example, you want players to easily find other players to play with, the same language, the same style, the same skill, et cetera. Let’s say, potentially, we’re going to measure up our success about how many full parties we’re able to create within the community of people that actually take that further step before clicking the button to enter the pug to create a little bit more meaningful social connection. This is valuable for the pug but also for playing tournaments, qualifiers, and those things. So it’s this tool, this product, that is able to easily substitute the traditional “looking for group” type of service, but done in a much more advanced way compared to what’s usually been done in our industry.

On the other side, there’s also the fact that we can treasure the learnings we’ve had from experiences like hubs and clans. We’ve managed, I believe, some success-- like we have those users, those communities who’ve used these features on FACEIT to get a certain value out of it, but we’re working to bring together all this learning to present a new potential product, interaction for the community to create groups and play in a very simple way where again, the bottom line is to create meaningful social connection and less randomness in the way we play the game.

What is the target demographic for this release?

There is a very small percentage of users who always play with friends. The vast majority of games, even within an ecosystem like FACEIT where you have people that are extremely committed to the game, happen as a solo or duo. Eighty percent of game sessions are from players that, even though they have a high level of commitment to the game, they click the play button as a solo, and they experience a game session where there is always a level of randomness. Not only can you not play on the best meta, so competitively speaking it’s not the best scenario, but also we truly believe that this is the fundamental reason why we are constantly talking about toxicity, misbehavior, and lack of accountability in gaming activity.

How will this differ from pre-existing features on FACEIT?

Hubs and clans are two different features, but the fundamental reason behind the new product is fighting this level of randomness. In a hub, it’s basically a closed group of people that decide to play internal pugs. We learned that activity, for certain reasons, can be better than matchmaking because you are removing a level of randomness. People start to know each other. There is some active real-time moderation happening because these spaces are moderated by admins. But, the negative is that it has this spiral of ego and testosterone among competitive gamers that doesn’t necessarily always create social connections.

The clan was an evolution of that idea. Let’s take a hub, so a closed group of players, a close-knit community moderated by admins, but instead of having players play against each other, they can instead group to create a party for matchmaking against other players. This has been dramatically more positive in general than the hub experience. We have way more players actively playing in clans and overall, the experience, and the retention, gave us a lot of learning, even though it was done in a relatively simple way.

The evolution of this will be a new product that aims to centralize all this learning into one single space, to have a community with both looking for group capabilities and incentivize as much as possible the creation of friendship. We are so passionate about competitive gaming. We want to make sure, like in traditional sports, first and foremost, you are part of a group of people. In traditional sports, you don’t have the concept of playing competitively while playing with random people over and over again. First and foremost, you are part of a group of people. In gaming, for many reasons, that’s where we’re struggling a little bit.

Did you have any concerns for FACEIT when Valve announced Premier Mode in CS2?

No, definitely no. The fundamental biggest product value that we provide to those who play on FACEIT is, obviously there are points related to the quality of the server, definitely, an aspect directed towards the quality of the anti-cheat, et cetera. There are definitely those utilities, but the fundamental goal for people playing on FACEIT is being part of a community with a certain mindset and a certain level. Premier, if anything, has the potential to become an extremely important backbone overall for Counter-Strike as a game and convert players into a more competitive type of mindset, which potentially could end up finding FACEIT a better path to reach an even further level.

We definitely lost a certain user, for example, those who were on FACEIT just for 128 tick [servers], because as we know, that was basically two different games. 64 and 128 tick is not just about the quality and responsiveness but the gameplay itself was different. The way you were throwing smokes, et cetera. When you are learning a certain type of gameplay, you don’t want to reset your learning on all that stuff. But, the vast majority of the competitive users of FACEIT use it for other reasons and those reasons are still there and they are definitely reasons we will continue to invest in. The anti-cheat and the general path to pro.

I believe Counter-Strike is the most mature sport that we have in the gaming industry and I believe the maturity of the sport is measured by the number of players and teams actually playing in a “sporty” fashion. That’s why team leagues, ESEA, is such an important piece for our community and ecosystem. Second, how quick and easy it is for a player of any skill level from any country to make a name for themselves and get into the professional scene. On that side, I feel like between FPL and other programs, we definitely manage to support this path for a lot of players. Also, for those who don’t necessarily have a team, to have the chance to do so, going back to the first problem we talked about. We had, surprisingly, people who reached FPL, you know the top talents, who didn’t even have four friends to play in a tournament. That’s how crazy the level is.

In general, I love Premier and I’m sure it's going to be great in the long term for Counter-Strike overall. We’re just happy to be part of this ecosystem. Let’s put it this way, we’re focusing on the mission more than the numbers.