9/9/2023 0 Comments Middleman cs go![]() But unlike “League,” where teams are franchised in leagues run by its developer, Riot Games, “Counter-Strike” offers fewer revenue streams, and outside of the top teams, many often fail to recoup their costs, including most of the Flashpoint teams. With “League of Legends” salaries entering the millions of dollars per year and “Counter-Strike,” to many, scoring as the second-biggest esport game on the eye test, its salaries have followed. Since summer 2016-when SK Gaming signed the reigning Major championship roster from Luminosity for $10,000 per month in salary-the cost of a “Counter-Strike” team has continued to climb. We had the access to the money to try and find something ourselves that had structurally different economics.” So as the entire industry changed and the team side of the esports industry changed, we felt like-and we weren’t alone, there were some other teams-there was an opportunity to do something different. “As awesome as the esport is, the business of ‘Counter-Strike’ is really bad,” former Cloud9 president and Flashpoint founding board member Dan Fiden told me in a March 2020 interview. The economics are a problem Flashpoint promised to address, allowing for teams to better partake in the riches generated by tournament organizers, while cutting out the middleman that exists in its biggest competitor, the ESL Pro League. Their other team peers and critics argue otherwise-that the Flashpoint teams bit off more than they could chew out of arrogance and greed to usurp their competitors. Many in the league blame COVID-19’s impact on its ability to run tournaments, but several also feel jaded by the financial model of the current North American “Counter-Strike” team, according to sources. For the second time, the power play to shake North American Counter-Strike has failed, and this time it’s unclear if a third act will ever be in the cards. įunctionally following its fourth event in May 2021, its member teams have stood at an impasse, unsure of how to proceed, with many giving up on the league altogether. While Flashpoint’s parent B Site isn’t legally defunct yet, its board contains just two members-representatives from MIBR owner Immortals and Dignitas-and it laid off its remaining staff, including former commissioner Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles, in January, sources familiar with the company told The Jacob Wolf Report. ![]() Only one of those teams has retained roster pieces that they competed with in the league throughout 2020. Less than two years later, Dignitas withdrew from “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,” making six of the eight original partner teams for Flashpoint no longer participants in the game. The teams involved no longer questioned when the league could safely return to offline competition. What looked like a good bet in 2019 among some of North American esports’ most successful teams now seemed like it would easily lose the $16 million invested. Instead, amid an unforeseen set of pandemic-related circumstances, the league found itself-like everyone else-struggling to organize solely online, with teams locked down in their apartments or team houses, commentators broadcasting from home and a custom-built Los Angeles-based studio dormant for most of the year. Launched as a “revolutionary league” for North American “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive ,” Flashpoint set itself up to cut out the middleman, fix loudly-expressed economic issues within the game and bring a new style of content to one of the West’s oldest esports. While the NBA and other sports leagues successfully pulled off a bubble environment for their seasons, the much-less experienced Flashpoint continued to struggle. It was another hurdle in what seemed like an endless run of COVID-19 issues, which by then had affected an estimated 70 million people and caused more than 1.7 million deaths worldwide. Within two weeks, their worst fear became a reality: A series of COVID-19 infections sidelined them in their final week of competition, postponing a playoff bracket match and bringing the competition to a halt. That November, with the virus outlook improving, the crew behind Flashpoint hoped that they could get back on track. Nine months after the sports world shut down amid the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020, a series of top esports players, commentators and staff flew to London.
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