Since 2005 and then 2006, the American satellite TV provider DirecTV had been seriously considering entering the esports market. After seeing the success that StarCraft had enjoyed in South Korea and the success that games like Counter-Strike enjoyed in the West, executives at the company saw an underexploited niche in the Western world.
DirecTV used insiders and experts such as Team 3D’s owner Craig Levine. Levine helped CGS map the esports landscape. The multibillion-dollar company planned to take esports to the mainstream with an investment of around $50 million. Unlike most of those who had come before them, DirecTV had the weapons -- financial and otherwise -- with which to make it happen.
Although attempts to regularly televise esports had been made several times in Europe, none had been successful or even close to profitable. In the United States, MLG had made short-lived appearances on several cable networks but came to focus on internet streaming instead.
Only South Korea had successfully and consistently put esports on television. However, Korea’s unique economic, geographic and social situations led Western executives to assume that a new model would be needed outside of Korea.
Korea’s economic explosion had led to a parallel explosion in internet use and gaming that lent itself to the rise of esports. The Korean government subsidized the proliferation of PC Bangs (Korean internet cafes) as the country was wired and helped spread and maintain gaming’s popularity. The wiring was helped enormously by the smallness of the country and the largeness and density of its urban centers. The game of choice, StarCraft, came along at such a lucky time and place that it practically won a lottery in many respects.
It was thought that an American league would need to take a different tack.
The CGS aimed to take Counter-Strike’s sequel to the mainstream along with several other would-be competitive games such as Dead or Alive 4, FIFA 07, World of Warcraft and Project Gotham Racing 3.
Counter-Strike’s sequel was dubbed Counter-Strike: Source (CSS). Developed by Valve, CSS has never reached the competitive heights of its imposing older brother. It is seen by many gamers as a half-assed attempt by Valve to dumb down Counter-Strike’s gameplay for the masses while providing a graphical overhaul that amounts to eye candy and little more. The competitive community at large never accepted it. Although it has improved vastly in recent years thanks to a new team taking the reins, its chief opportunity to be adopted was through the CGS.
In the same vein, the CGS wanted to remake all competitive gaming into a product palatable for Western audiences. The CGS opted against tried and true competitive games such as Quake, Counter-Strike 1.6 or StarCraft, all deemed too old to sell hardware for sponsors, too ugly to capture the attention of the country and too violent and fast paced to explode into the world’s living rooms.
Instead, CGS opted for a set of disciplines that had a relatively small following in the esports world but were more widely popular in the mainstream gaming world. Despite professing to focus on the game first and foremost, the presentation of the league was seen as cringe-worthy, closer to the adolescent spectacle of professional wrestling than any legitimate competition had a right to be.
Players were pushed to be characters for the camera, to be provocative and use aggressive, self-promotional artificial catch phrases such as "I’m the man to beat!"
Good looking girls occasionally in bikinis who had never been close to competitively successful in the games in question were plugged into the CGS, potentially one of the most important competitions in esports history, to add sex appeal and to fight negative stereotypes about gamers. Instead of fighting the stereotype of females being bad at games, it reinforced the stereotype that females are often given undeserved attention and praise in esports simply for the fact that they are female.
CGS poured the lion’s share of its $50 million originally meant for three seasons into the first two seasons. Financially speaking, there was little chance it could continue unless the viewership was spectacular, unprecedented and beyond any reasonable expectation.
As opposed to an organization such as IEM, which was gradually and organically built up over a decade and possesses solid foundations, the CGS’s foundations were flimsy and ephemeral.
The entire aesthetic of CGS was of a contrived, adolescent school of design, the sort of thinking that tends to reduce all male-dominated activities to fake explosions and faker breasts, which, in this context at least, are not as good as they might sound.
A gimmicky show was given to fans. The viewership was not what DirecTV had hoped for. The CGS lasted into 2008 before it was finally axed during a changing of the corporate guard at DirecTV as well as, of course, the economic downturn.
"It all went to hell in a hand basket when some well intentioned but corporate suit type people tried to change gaming, the spirit of gaming and it crashed and burned during a bad economy" said Jason Lake, the owner of Complexity Gaming. “That was really hard on me, man. I’m quoted on video saying, ‘if this doesn’t work, esports is dead’ and, unfortunately, I wasn’t that far from the truth at the time. When CGS crashed and burned, the scene in North America especially was just a train wreck. That took a lot of emotional energy from me and just sucked it out.”
At the same time, the WSVG replaced Counter-Strike and Warcraft 3, two tested esports, with mainstream titles Guitar Hero 2, Fight Night 3 and World of Warcraft. It was becoming disturbingly commonplace for ambitious leagues to attempt to force mainstream games onto competitive gamers and to attempt to force competitive gaming onto mainstream gamers.
Mountains of money were pumped into these artificially created competitions and when the viewership and attendance did not meet hopes, sponsors were scared away from the esports industry in a major way. After campaigns to snatch up entire esports teams (including Team 3D) and swaths of top players (including Heaton) in exclusive contracts, these organizations failed spectacularly. The blow to the esports industry on all levels -- including to personnel, infrastructure and sponsorship -- was monumental.
Players’ contracts across all major games had become inflated with the artificial injection of cash into the industry. When the major sponsors pulled out in a hurry, teams struggled to continue to pay their stars. Warcraft 3 suffered a particularly gruesome fate thanks to this artificial inflation as some of the world’s largest teams either pulled out of the game or collapsed completely.
As esports suffered from the aforementioned collapse of several major organizations, the Western world was plunged into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression due in no small part to wildly speculative bubbles bursting violently. What a strange coincidence.
If the esports industry was going to thrive, it seemed it would have to weather darkness. Counter-Strike 1.6 was down, Warcraft 3 had been hit hard, StarCraft had long lain dormant in the West, Quake suffered a major downturn and the console scene would eventually slow and stagnate. The world wondered if this was the final bust endured in a long, fruitless cycle that has been the story of esports thus far.