autimatic claims NA CS "died" because shroud and tarik retired, among other factors

Timothy "autimatic" Ta, one of the ELEAGUE Boston Major 2018 champions, has come up with a slew of reasons why NA CS "sucks" in his latest YouTube video.

The North American scene has been less competitive since the COVID-19 pandemic, but other factors impacted NA just as much, in autimatic's opinion.

1) The absence of big personalities like shroud and tarik

The biggest reason why NA CS "died", according to autimatic, is directly related to Michael "shroud" Grzesiek and Tarik "tarik" Celik's retirement from CS:GO.

I know what you're thinking, 'Tim, you were so much better than both of them, and the scene should have been able to live on even after they retired'.

While I agree with you, I'm not talking about in-game wise, I'm talking about their streams, [which] were huge. shroud was pulling in about 10,000 viewers every night, tarik was [pulling in] 5,000 to 10,000, and I think this did a lot for the CS community.

For one, it brought a lot of eyes to the nightly FPL games, it brought a lot of fans, and overall I think it just brought a lot of support for teams like C9 for shroud and OpTic for tarik. We're just missing that right now.

Back then as a viewer, I felt like you could probably find someone that you liked and watch FPL every night. That brought a sense of community that is no longer really a thing.

2) The COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic forced all tournaments to shift from LAN to online competition and also kept the regions restrained to themselves, at least throughout most of 2020. This made matches boring to viewers, according to autimatic.

All the tournaments were online, there wasn't really that much hype because it was the same match week after week, right? Overall, the scene wasn't dead, but that was kind of the start of things trending downward.

3) NA pros switching to VALORANT

After Riot Games released VALORANT in 2020, it directly affected the NA CS scene as many talented players saw an irresistible opportunity in the new game.

The best examples are the Chaos trio of Nathan "leaf" Orf, Anthony "vanity" Malaspina, and Erick "Xeppaa" Bach, and Evil Geniuses' Ethan "Ethan" Arnold. The latter went as far as winning VALORANT Champions in 2023, the most coveted international tournament in Riot Games' FPS.

The reason why VALORANT hurt us so much was because it really shut off the talent pipeline, if you will.

If you break up the NA scene back then in terms of tiers, you had tier-one pros, you had tier-two pros, and you had tier-three pros. When VALORANT came out, some tier-one pros went to VALORANT, and almost all tier-two pros went to VALORANT, and tier-three pros didn't go to VALORANT because they were going to get outshined by the tier-two pros anyway.

The [tier-three pros] now became tier-two, so we didn't see the effects of VALORANT until later on because all the teams were still intact. Liquid was still a team, EG was still a team, Gen.G was still a team. But as things started happening such as tier-one pros retiring, going to VALORANT, and going to Europe, it started to become a problem. There weren't enough players that were ready for their shot at tier-one.

That's no fault of the tier-three players, that's just how it was. When you're a tier-three pro, you're just not ready as a player to play in Europe. It's a different game in Europe if I'm being honest.

To add to what autimatic said, personalities like tarik and shroud became two of the biggest influencers in VALORANT and built huge communities there with their co-streams. Had they stayed more involved with Counter-Strike, they could have helped make the game more popular in NA.

What about the solution?

For autimatic, the solution to NA CS is to have more veterans involved in teams to help the younger generation, and have more content creators such as Erik "fl0m" Flom, Austin "Cooper" Abadir, Jake "Stewie2K" Yip, and himself around.

I'm here to join them and I want to make content for North America, so that we can hopefully bring some more eyes to NA and maybe bring a sense of community. I think that's one thing that NA is kind of lacking right now.