Passive Valve, Cyberpunk 2077 release and stagnation in the CIS – our disappointments in 2023

Esports was not ready for a pandemic

When the COVID-19 epidemic was only gaining momentum, we lightheartedly joked about bat soups and did not believe that these events would somehow affect our lives. By the spring, the situation had changed: the coronavirus took over the whole world, not only depriving us of concerts and other noisy gatherings, but also teaching us to think twice before just leaving the house. But if fans of football, Slipknot, which could have come to Park Live in the summer, and Christopher Nolan’s films could only be sadly locked up because of the transfers, fans of games and esports had every reason to believe in the best – after all, they had no stranger to.

Disappointment came quickly: already in May, active Dota 2 viewers began to complain about monotonous tournaments that merged into one endless stream of repeated matches. The claims were fully justified: due to the difference in ping, the teams were actually locked in their regions and were forced to compete only with their neighbors, due to which the variety in matches diminished. So, from April to December, fans had the opportunity to see 14 games between Team Secret and Team Liquid – and now the next battle between Puppey and iNSaNiA is unlikely to be able to cause a stir among the dotters. But quite recently, such derbies had to wait for months!

We were talking above about Dota 2, but other disciplines overtook the same problems. It’s a paradox, but such a young, technologically advanced and infinitely ambitious eSports was not ready for a full transition to online – almost all market players simply froze in place, not looking for ways to replace canceled offline activities with some new formats.

In the spring, Virtus.pro CEO Sergei Glamazda said in an interview that the clubs will have to restructure their work taking into account the new conditions, since it is important for fans to see their favorite esportsmen (and for sponsors – their logos on jersey). Among the options offered by Glamazda there was even a format of a reality show from a bootcamp, but this is just a club initiative – imagine what scope for creativity, for example, the TO had. However, in the end, the only quarantine creative for the entire season was the players’ webcams turned on during matches. It is not surprising that even the esportsmen themselves were tired of their native disciplines by the end of the season.

Riot Games could serve as an example for the competition as it was able to host Worlds 2023, the largest offline tournament of the year. The company decided on a serious adventure: it gathered all the teams in the hotel, creating a kind of bubble for them – all the amenities for guests were available in the building. At the end of two weeks of quarantine, when the organizers made sure that there were no infected among the participants, the teams were admitted to the tournament. And it’s really cool!

However, in the first half of the year, Riot also fell into a kind of suspended animation. In the spring, the company released Valorant, a competitive shooter with big ambitions that was supposed to squeeze CS: GO, or at least force it to fight for the title of the best shooter on the planet. However, the pandemic has made adjustments, and therefore the advertising campaign of the game, in fact, was limited to streams of shroud and Ninja. As the category’s views on Twitch by the end of the year show, such measures were not enough.

Gabin missed

But if Riot Games at least tried (and even succeeded at the end of the year), then Valve, with the beginning of the pandemic, simply closed its eyes with its hands and let all esports in their disciplines go by themselves. Therefore, she deserved a separate cauldron, that is, a chapter in this article.

As the home isolation period began around the world, the shares of the largest companies in the gaming market began to rise – in parallel with the views of all channels on Twitch. For esports, this was a time of opportunity: representatives of Formula 1, NBA, football came to it and thus immediately made our industry much more interesting for a wide audience. However, Valve did not take advantage of the situation and actually withdrew from the process of managing Dota 2 and CS: GO.

The only management decisions made by the developers this year were tournament cancellations. The first victim of the pandemic was the Dota 2 Major ESL One in Los Angeles. By the way, while Valve was deciding on this, some of the teams had already arrived at the venue. Then the EPICENTER Major in the same Dota and ESL One Rio in CS: GO were canceled. With the latter, Valve showed particular shortsightedness: the morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 broke all records in Brazil, but the publisher announced not the cancellation, but only the transfer of the major from May to November.

At the same time, teams that had already qualified for the Major were strictly forbidden to carry out reshuffles – any rearrangements would deprive them of their honestly earned slots. Chet ImAPet Shin then seriously thought about the mental health of developers. Soon the system began to be corrected: ESL announced a new round of qualifiers, which were to be held in all regions by November. But here’s the bad luck: by November it was not safer in Brazil, and therefore the Major had to be canceled, thus depriving all the past qualifying tournaments of meaning.

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