THE BAD

Richard “Dr. Gonzo” Lewis explores the first part of a brand new three part series delving into the death of the Championship Gaming Series; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Sure, some gamers got a salary of sorts and it made a lot of noise about being the first professional gaming league without really acknowledging the fact that top gamers getting salaries was not really a new concept, but was it really professional? If you were living with family or were at university then you could afford not to work. Anyone who was living outside of a state of arrested development could not subsist on the salary alone and would have to take another job, sort of defeating the point. This especially became true after the re-structuring of the salaries in the second season when at points in the year the players would pick up in one month what a minimum wage job would provide in a week or so. It's a cheap trick to use dictionary definitions but a professional is defined as: "a person who earns a living in a sport or other occupation frequently engaged in by amateurs". Can you really call it "earning a living" if you have to supplement your income?

Back when the CGS first started I was told two things. The first was the fact players didn't have to work would free them up to play more often and therefore this extra practice would increase their skill level. The second was that it was in their contracts that they had to practice so many hours per week if they wished to remain within the organisation... Any breach of contract would be treated very seriously was the party line. Yet what typically happened with most of the teams was the moment the draft was over they simply did not play or practice at all. This is especially true of Berlin Allianz and Stockholm Magnetik who barely took part in any online competitions and even less so at LANs. The reward was there regardless of what they did and they had a guaranteed shot at the World Championship prize pot even if they were just going to go through the motions. At least in the US they had the benefit of a full season, as opposed to simply playing off against each other once.

I'm now sick and tired of hearing players asking about wages when they are on the lookout for an organisation. I don't know when gamers got so greedy, but the worst part of it is that the ones asking for the wages are the ones who don't do enough to deserve it. It has trickled down from the CGS and changed the expectations of every upcoming kid who can shoot a bit. What is so terrible about free LAN entry, free travel, free hotels and keeping any prize money you win? Of course now there is the matter of those former CGS players ultimately turning around and saying "what's the point of playing for no salary?" and turning their back on the game. When you see players who couldn't even be bothered to practice when they were getting paid turn around and say they're thinking about throwing in the towel now the money isn't there, you have to think that any scene is better off without that kind of lazy parasite anyway.

While there were some players who it was unavoidable to draft based on performances, there were numerous occasions where players were brought in despite having done little or nothing to warrant their inclusion while players who deserved it seemed to be overlooked. At the last draft people can not be in any doubt that Sandor “proph” de Munck was one of the best players there, yet he only made taxi player. Sondre 'REAL' Svanevik got drafted off the back of modest performances and was quickly dropped from the team for “PC problems” and replaced, not with a taxi player, but Daniel "giftig" Ivarsson who also hadn’t scaled the same heights as other options. There was also no consistency in the decisions; 4kings were drafted despite under-performing at the event off the back of everything they had achieved prior to the draft, yet fnatic were overlooked despite dominating the scene before CGS came along as they didn’t do enough on the day. One of the most cynical things that occurred during the draft was the decision to overlook one FIFA player - Ramon 'Asimov' Abella – who had finished second overall and was looking the smart choice - for the twin brother of Volodymr “Chud1k” Nedoviz because it made a much better story. Things such as these really made people question just what it was a GM was looking for and whether there was a bigger agenda at work.

For those of us who see the game we play as a competitive e-sport to have to see it subverted into some kind of game show was a grotesque affront. Yet the attempts to manufacture grudges where there were none and self-perpetuate the idea that the CGS was the only place to be seemed to take up more time of the brains behind it than anything else. Footage was leaked showing players and managers doing take after take of reactions that were supposedly spontaneous. Once you got past how clearly manufactured it was you couldn’t even sit down and enjoy the technical aspects of the game. Counter-Strike: Source especially was treated with disdain, being shown with a third person view so you couldn’t really appreciate the skills involved in the play and then not even showing the entire matches. But you couldn’t expect too much from a production team that did not even know what STV demos were when it came to editing the footage together. In short the end product alienated gamers that really should have been the core of any viewers it attracted and probably harmed the idea of it being a genuine “sport” rather than helped develop it.

The CGS was conceived as an isolated league. Any player competing in it were originally not supposed to be competing anywhere else, although concessions were made as it was both good marketing and a further supplement to the players income. Ideally though they would have liked it that the only place you could watch those players compete was in their own league, against their own teams. It would help solidify the illusion that they were the best. Imagine if they continually lost to other non-CGS teams… What would that say about the “professionals”? As far as they were concerned the existing scenes of the games they televised were little more than talent pools to be dipped in and out of at will. If the CGS had integrated with the existing scenes as opposed to running some virtual hostile takeover they’d have gathered a lot more support and it may even have provided them with a more solid foothold. Instead, their arrogance and swagger put them immediately at loggerheads with everyone who wasn’t already in the fold, or wasn’t a consideration to be added in the future. When it came to how they handled the media they also tried to buy as much positive publicity as possible and tried to exercise their influence to stop people printing anything that could be construed as negative. Their failure proves to be a powerful lesson; that no matter how much money you have you cannot always pay your way to acceptability.