The future of 1.6 has been extremely bleak of late as more and more events seem to be dropping the FPS title from their ticket in favour of more lucrative and popular games. With it, some pessimists have said, comes the death knell of the competitive FPS title.

It seems that this trend is set to continue when sources informed us that an announcement regarding the game's future would be made by the Intel Extreme Masters sometime soon and stated, off the record, that the game would be dropped from their tour.

However, it was suggested that it would not be replaced by another iteration of Counter-Strike and instead the next season of IEM would simply not feature a version of the game, instead focusing on LoL and SC2.

Of course we have no reason to doubt these reports given the nature of the source and certainly we were present at the last IEM World Championship where several staff and players intimated that the game would not be featuring again any time soon. Official comment at the time was that no decision had been made but there was no immediate need to change anything.

What the driving force would be is anyone's guess. The IEM and indeed the 1.6 community proudly boasted of their streaming viewing figures, which supposedly beat some of the SC2 numbers. However it does seem that it's likely time is up for the game, even if it may only be a temporary measure.

We approached Michal "Carmac" Blicharz for comment and he declined to make one at the present moment.