In 2023, our editorial office celebrates two birthdays at once – ten years since the appearance of the Virtus.pro website and five years since the launch of Cybersport.ru. During this time, we have come a long way from a small team portal with match results to the largest Russian-language e-sports media. In this article, our former and current employees remembered how it all began and told several interesting stories about their work.
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Virtuspro.org | New “home” for Counter-Strike fans
In the early 2010s, most of the Russian Counter-Strike fans were based in the Iron Will group on VKontakte. There they published the results of matches, uploaded videos with highlights and other entertaining content. It was in this group that the backbone of the community of the future Virtuspro.org website was formed.
In 2011, the Iron Will team brought the Virtus.pro tag back to the professional Counter-Strike scene, and at the same time the team’s first news resource appeared. April 18 took place website launchwith only three people involved – programmer Yuri Norton Timofeev, editor Kirill gurkie Ovsyannikov and Anton Sneg Cherepennikov, who acted as an investor and ideological inspirer.
The Virtus.pro community on VKontakte gave the site not only the first visitors, but also the first employees. Many of the group’s moderators later went to work in the editorial office of the site, but at first everything was done on sheer enthusiasm by volunteers. At that time, few people generally believed in a team site as a business project capable of generating profit or at least self-sufficiency.
“Probably, at that moment, except for Sneg, no one thought at all how important the role of the media, that is, the group and the website, was. Even I, a person from this field with a specialized education, underestimated the importance of this story. Nobody went to Sneg and said that you need to find copywriters at least remotely. Then it all seemed like a story from another reality. <…> We held various competitions to find moderators for the group or designers, just people who can write some kind of short post with a report after the match. So we were looking for people who could work in the state. Some of them got into the staff like that and then worked for many years even in Virtus.pro ”.
The situation changed by the end of 2011. The Virtus.pro management decided to move away from the concept of a command portal and turn it into an informational eSports resource of general focus. As a reference, we looked towards the then popular ProPlay.ru and CyberFight.ru. At first, the site began to cover the results of other tournaments where VP did not play. Later, new disciplines and sections appeared on the main page, such as a block with matches, a championship schedule and a page with guides. The turning point was the arrival of the first major sponsor, BenQ. She demanded that reports on integrations in various materials be submitted every month, so it was for the work with BenQ that new employees were recruited on the site, responsible for video content, graphics, articles and interviews. In particular, ProPlay editor Andrey FUki Kiryukin, who became the chief editor of Virtus.pro in 2015, joined the project.
“Then the approach of many changed, the vision of the project and its scale changed. We realized that this is a business. Small and very risky, but still a business. Then it became obvious to everyone. “
In parallel with the development of the site, the organization also expanded. Virtus.pro opened up divisions for StarCraft II, Rage of Titans and War Inc., and a female CS 1.6 roster was formed from former mousesports players.
With the advent of new disciplines and the release of StarCraft II, the site’s audience gradually began to grow. The biggest increase in users was due to the fans of World of Tanks who came for the Jove modpacks, which were very popular at that time. During the days of their release, the site constantly crashed due to the load.
Kirill gr1nder Rusakov:
“When a new patch for World of Tanks was released, the Jove team rolled out the update for the modpack to our website. On such days, you could forget about work for an hour, and sometimes even more – the site was just dead. It took more than a year to increase the server capacity and forget about these problems. But by that time, the esports audience of our site had already become large enough to kill the site during top events and without the participation of Jove. However, compared to the attack on users of his modpacks in 2013-2014, the outages did not last long – just a few minutes. “
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Virtuspro.org 2011 site
Virtus.pro | Moving from a team site to a media model
The decision to develop Virtuspro.org as a full-fledged information resource about esports led to a complete change in the site’s design and structure. Development began back in 2011, but the official presentation took place in November 2013, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the club. Then the site moved to a new domain – www.virtus.pro.
The main feature of the new media portal was its own database of players and tournaments, which at that time consisted of almost 2 thousand profiles of e-sportsmen and about a thousand of teams’ profiles. Convenient reports and match pages have appeared, and a tweet feed has been added to the traditional news feed. The sections “Blogs”, “Streams” and “Education” received a big update.
“We have been making our dream website for almost two years. We were few, we were scattered in different cities, but we regularly came to Moscow, where we met in a cafe or in the office with Anton Cherepennikov and Yura Timofeev (our main developer). We drew the future of our site on sheets of paper …
We had a desire to make the coolest statistics database, comparable in scope to Liquipedia. And while the admin panel of the site was not yet ready, I entered all the introductory information on teams, players, organizations and tournaments in Word. At the time of launching the site, there were hundreds of pages with basic information and descriptions. At the end of 2013, everything was ready for launch. “
The editorial team of the site gradually began to expand. Authors from GoodGame, ProPlay, Gameinside and other resources came to work on Virtus.pro. The coverage of the covered disciplines has increased – League of Legends, Warface, Heroes of the Storm and other games have been added to the “traditional” ones for the CS: GO, Dota 2 and StarCraft II sites.
“Around this time, I just came to work on the site. Being an old doter to the core, I often argued with the guys who covered LoL about the prospects for this discipline. One of the main reasons for the beginning of such disputes was the moments when the guys ignored the queue of important news on other disciplines, while writing absolutely insignificant materials on LoL with a pipeline.
It made me very angry then, but now I understand their motivation. Seeing how successful LoL is in the world, the few fans of this game were excited about the arrival of Riot Games in our region, and they truly believed that this was a watershed moment. I can say for sure that Virtus.pro (which was already becoming the flagship of esports media at that time), or rather, its LoL authors, did everything in their power to bring this discipline to the top in the CIS. But for a number of reasons, their efforts were in vain – even after many years, League of Legends was still unable to compete with the CS: GO and Dota 2 disciplines in the CIS.
I can tell a similar story about StarCraft II, only there events developed the other way around – once the flagship discipline was rapidly losing popularity.
These examples clearly show that if the audience is not interested in something, then it will be very difficult to change this situation. What Nikolay said about Rainbow Six Siege in the AMA session, we realized in practice long before his arrival. Therefore, you can rest assured: if something is really in demand, we will definitely not miss it, because from this we ourselves will only lose. We love esports as much as you do. We have people in the editorial office who closely follow other disciplines like R6, LoL or Quake and are very familiar with these scenes. “
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2015 Virtus.pro website
In this form, the Virtus.pro site existed for two and a half years, until a new reform into a modern media portal began. Now some users are scolding us that we write not only about e-sports, but also about games. But these are clearly newfags, because real oldies should remember what we wrote about earlier.
“We were a very versatile site! In search of ourselves, we covered the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 European Championship, 2015 and 2016 Ice Hockey World Championships. They even tried to cover the RPL, but the case somehow died out. I must say that football and hockey on the site were well received by the audience and people actively commented on the results of matches and goals scored.
The coverage of Eurovision was also popular. We conducted live text broadcasts in a group on VKontakte. What heated discussions of songs and tournament layouts were there!
We also had a lifestyle section. But unlike Kanobu, we wrote there not about sex and prostitutes, but about quite decent things. We talked about nanorobots, LEGOs, movies, cars, male professions and even concerts. Maybe it’s time to return these sections … “
But the era of some other headings is gone forever (and thank God!). Old-timers of the site will probably remember our old reviews of the matches of the day, which for several years were published daily with various adjectives in the headings. There were “hot” matches of the day, and “fragile”, and “glass” … Yes, there were none! Sometimes it was more difficult to find a new, previously unused adjective than to draw up the table itself with dozens of matches in several disciplines.
“When I first came to work on the site, this section already existed and was a kind of internal meme in the editorial office – strange but funny.
Due to the time zone, my shift usually started a little earlier than other employees, so every working morning on the site I started with the matches of the day. They needed to be issued as early as possible, because the games were often played from the very morning. If at first the adjectives, even indirectly, but somehow corresponded to the content of the matches – for example, they really were “decisive” or “useless” – then over time it became more and more difficult to maintain logical connections without repeating adjectives. I don’t know exactly how many of these matches of the day I have completed all the time – I think at least a couple of hundred news, and almost never adjectives were repeated. Sometimes I even had to look in the dictionary to find suitable options for the title.
Users reacted ambiguously to these strange adjectives. At first, they were surprised, tried to find logic, doubted the author’s mental health, but then they also began to treat the rubric with humor and perceive it as a meme. Sometimes people offered their own options, and a couple of times they even thanked for “an interesting word that they have never heard”.
In January 2018, it was announced that the ESforce holding would be acquired by Mail.ru Group. This pushed us to greater responsibility. That year, along with new editors from non-cyber sports, editorial standards were developed and the quality of the texts improved markedly. Now it is extremely difficult to read the materials that came out with us before 2018.
Cybersport.ru | The largest Russian-language e-sports media
On April 4, 2016, the site moved to the Cybersport.ru domain, which previously belonged to the FCC of Russia. The project management decided to change the name and abandon the connection with the legendary Russian club in order to develop independently. The old site address still worked for some time, until users got used to the new design. Later it was closed, and after a while it was restarted as a page of the Virtus.pro team.
“Back in 2012, Virtuspro.org ceased to be an exclusively team site. It was interesting for us to write about everything that happens in the industry, we wanted to become a major esports media. The VP domain held back our growth and did not allow us to get a new audience that did not want to associate themselves with any team. We were looking for a new domain for a long time, until we were lucky with Cybersport.ru. This title was perfect for what we wanted to write about the whole esports. “
Cybersport.ru received a completely new design with a clear division into blocks. The Hot News section (short news in one line) appeared, and spoiler stubs were added to the results of the matches. Streams and reports were placed in the header of the site, and the recordings of matches, the forum and the blogosphere were removed to the “basement”. Over time, they decided to abandon the forum altogether.
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Cybersport.ru website sample of 2016
“In the format of our site, the forum was not in demand at all by users. The bottom line is that the conditional Prodota.ru hardly published news and rarely parsed small and medium news feeds, so the forum was live there and all the details were discussed by users not in the comments, but in the relevant topics. We actively filled the tape with any little things, and all the commentators’ discussions were there. Literally two dozen people wrote on the forum, and even then from time to time. In addition, we had a blogosphere where everyone could publish their great material, which also made no sense to create any topics on the forum. Therefore, it hung like a dead weight for a long time and took place on the main page. And when the new design was being developed, the forum was finally and irrevocably removed. “
In October 2017, the current version of the site was released. The general news feed was divided into two – for news and for large materials. At the request of users, we implemented a search, and only the most interesting games began to be displayed in the match sticker. A lot of work was done on the blogs section, as well as revised the system of ratings for posts – instead of one overall rating, we made separate indicators for the pros and cons.
Perhaps the biggest change in the design of Cybersport.ru was the appearance of a “TV” on the main page. Now the hottest and most interesting news or materials go there, and not so long ago the matches of the day began to appear. On the right is a panel with transfers, which is sometimes replaced by a block with streams.
Speaking of other changes, one cannot fail to mention the coronavirus pandemic, which in one way or another has affected almost all areas of life. Our editorial office is lucky that all employees can work remotely, but because of this, a lot of curious moments arise. However, some foreign employees were imbued with this topic much earlier than office colleagues.
“The work of a remote editor is much more interesting and varied than it seems at first glance, but sometimes it looks extremely strange from the outside. Especially my wife laughs at this =)
Oh, this is an awkward feeling when she comes up to throw a couple of phrases, and on my screen another cosplay with a cutie in a miniskirt and an armored bra is taking shape, and once Sneaky also toughly set me up. Around that moment, the phrase “This is for work” became our family meme.
“Yes, dear, all these beautiful half-naked girls in my browser are needed for work – we will choose the best cosplay on Ciri …”
“No, I don’t have a day off. I need to watch the first season of The Witcher, then write a review … “
“What am I playing? Yes, I want to refresh some things in my memory. This is for the article … “
“Yes, I watch these anime series to write material on them later …”
There are quite a few such examples, and every time I am glad that my wife has a great sense of humor. “
Some of our editorial team has been working for you for many years, while others have come to us only recently. But together we want to continue to make interesting content for our four million audience.
Editorial staff:
Chief Editor:
- Andrey FUki Kiryukin (since 2011).
Special Projects Editor:
- Ekaterina a_bemol Semukhina (since 2014).
Authors:
- Kirill gr1nder Rusakov (since 2013),
- Dmitry Craft Murr (since 2015),
- Daniil Smacked Khvalev (since 2017),
- Vladislav Fesh Danilyuk (since 2017),
- Vladislav Machinae Zhivotnev (since 2018),
- Julia yulch1q Iskovskikh (since 2019),
- Anastasia allestron Bismuth (since 2019),
- Bair Vydar Modonov (since 2019),
- Vyacheslav PilotBaker Ipatov (since 2019),
- Sergey Lampochko Sergienko (since 2023),
- Alexander Flash1k Cherbaev (since 2023),
- Pavel Wear2High Bobkov (since 2023).
Corrector:
- Evgeniya iLibra Shtanko (since 2018).
Head of Statistics Department:
- Yaroslav 1010 Bashtanikov (since 2016).
Statistics Department:
- Alexander ZN Poselsky (since 2016),
- Alexander Apel5in Geiko (since 2017),
- Roman icerazeonce Sokolov (since 2018),
- Konstantin kuzma Preobrazhensky (since 2019).
