Postmortem: Why the CGS is dead

The final Championship Gaming Series press release, heralding the death of the company, is entitled “An Idea Whose Time Came Too Early.” Digest that.

This statement really does disservice to the gaming community that CGS purported to serve. Did anyone honestly think that CGS would reach an audience of 100 million people? 100,000?

CGS aimed high, but way off the mark, and in many respects, its death was inevitable. While this is regrettable because a good number of people I know are out of a job, I think it’s time we looked at the reality of the situation.

Welcome to the microculture

*giggle* We're so popular, millions of people love us!

I’ve said before and I’ll say again that we are in a microculture age. People go searching for what interests them in broad terms, and no longer rely on networks to deliver content that is deemed appropriate. The best example of this is the rising popularity of serial shows like Heroes, Lost, and other dramas, irrespective of the networks they’re on.

The shows are financed by the networks but also available on iTunes. The consumer wins, because he doesn’t have to sit through commercials. Networks win because they get a cut of the price. But this model only works due to the critical mass of fans available to watch or download the show.

At its core, the CGS was not a league. It was a reality TV show with a small audience, because the target audience won’t allow iteself to be forcefed content, and it doesn’t really like watching other people play games. Gamers would generally rather be playing, instead of watching. And males 18-35 don’t watch as much TV as they used to, even if video games are on the tube.

While we’re on the topic of the microculture, we may as well address the fact that competitive gaming has its own microcultures as well. First person shooter players stick to their genre, real time strategy gamers have their own sites, and racing game fans have their own forums. The analogy of trying to herd cats works very well in this situation.

The NFL-sized audience doesn’t exist anymore on TV, let alone in gaming.

I’d say that the only destinations that have successfuly unified the various gaming audiences are news sites (both gaming industry and e-Sports) and league sites that allow open participation. This leads us to…

Exclusivity and entry

The CGS was obsessed with exclusivity. First came the acquisitions of Team 3D and compLexity, tying up the two big players in the U.S. scene. The best players on those teams were essentially tied to the squads–after all, what would they do? Leave their teams to return to a (then) barren Counter-Strike 1.6 wasteland in North America?

CGS then banned its players from competing in Counter-Strike 1.6 tournaments, hoping to lock up the talent pool. Additionally, individual players were fined for violating their contracts by playing at local LANs.

Several prominent European teams refused to join the show based simply on the fact that they could make more money winning on the open market. It turns out they were right, while the once-mighty compLexity languished near the bottom of the CGS rankings with an all-time record of 7-17, unable to collect the salary bonuses its players so desperately needed to make up the difference.

It’s worth noting that every online gaming entity (except Major League Gaming) that tried to sign its players to exclusivity agreements gave up on the idea eventually. In the pro gaming world, player exclusivity is an aberration that creates artificial barriers between sponsored gamers and the unwashed masses.

In the end, the exclusive league has a vested interest in seeing its contracted gamers win so it can market them as stars, snowballing into a status-quo situation where only the sponsored can win. This is is where MLG is at now and where CGS was headed if it ever tried to unify the “real” salaried CGS and the Pro-Am league.

Don’t believe me? Then how come OPTX beat 3D.NY in the final Pro-AM Counter-Strike: Source match?

This bicep is sponsored by Mountain Dew.

But the biggest mistake CGS made in terms of exclusivity, and barriers to entry, was not having any online component to start with. Show up at the combine on the off-chance that a franchise general manager likes you enough to draft you? No thanks.

Entry to CGS appeared to be based heavily on marketability and apparent personal favors between GMs, putting a lie to the idea that anyone could be a pro gamer. Instead, you could only be a pro gamer if you were good looking enough, a girl, or already on a pro gaming team. If you had some combination thereof, you were golden.

True, the CGS Pro-Am did a little bit to address the issue of entry, but came too late in the game to mitigate the damage done in the first CGS season, which saw the company burn a large amount of cash…

The money angle

Did gigantic funbags lead to the downfall of CGS? (This picture is actually from the draft.)

Estimates vary on how much money CGS plowed through during its first season, but numbers in the $25 million range are not unheard of. I’d say that only a fifth of that went to player salaries, which were not bad for playing videogames but not much compared to what could be made working a real job.

The rest likely went toward paying for the draft at the Playboy mansion in season one, paying Fatal1ty to commentate matches, compensating an array of faceless executives, travel budgets, video production efforts including renting studio time at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, CA and other expenses we’ll never know about.

In season two, CGS continued the PR stunts with a VIP party including Reggie Bush and Kim Kardashian (who were undoubtedly paid to show off their bling and huge ass, respectively), and expanded from 10 to 16 franchises, absorbing new salary, travel, and website costs in the process.

Or was it this booty? (Pic by Gotfrag.)

The CGS solution to every problem seemed to be: “Buy it. If it doesn’t work, spend more money.” This is a fundamentally flawed approach when you have no audience, and while the economy wasn’t so haywire two years ago, none of the famed e-Sports entrepreneurs who run events would have even tried it.

Huge piles of cash don’t solve much of anything in the gaming event world; in fact, I’d wager that the air of gilded excess the CGS paraded around turned many gamers off.

CGS was a reality TV show with little of the entertainment value, or economic sense of reality TV.

Survivor has teams of people scrambling around deserted islands eating roaches to win a conjugal visit with a loved one. That’s entertainment. And it doesn’t cost $30 million to make it happen–just promise a first place prize of $1 million; the rest can live off roaches.

Time of death: Nov. 18 - 09:00

Despite my sympathy for the employees, I can’t help but think of the wasted opportunity that CGS became. It may be a very long time before we see “pro gaming” get any kind of mainstream media push again thanks to CGS and the World Series of Video Games biting the dust, and maybe that’s for the best.

Initiatives with community support built from the ground up need to come back into the e-Sports world, and while sponsor dollars are short, this would be the best time to build something that doesn’t need huge payouts to operate.

But to say that CGS was an idea whose time came too soon is an insult, because, if anything, the Championship Gaming Series was an idea whose time came too late to make any inroads into the pro gaming scene.