Valve Uncertain About an International Counter-Strike Tournament
In case you didn’t hear the other day, an international Dota 2 championship tournament was held, with the winners getting millions of dollars (the total pot was $18 million). This proved emphatically the level of desire and skill in video game tournaments. Given it’s success, you’d think that more tournaments, especially ones with highly played titles, would be brought up as soon as possible. But for Valve, their second most played game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, is still without a tournament.
Valve’s Erik Johnson did note that Counter-Strike could be coming to the Source 2 engine soon, but when asked about when a tournament would happen, he noted to IGN, “I don’t know that it has to be coming.”
“We’re pretty comfortable with different projects taking different approaches to solve similar problems,” he explained. “As a company we actually learn more when we do that. If we all point everything in the same direction, we’d have a real blind spot for when we’re screwing up. In some ways, you want to diversify a bunch of decisions across different projects because you zero in on the right answer quickly, as opposed to ‘we have this thing that’s working, everybody do that right now.”
Counter-Strike is growing in popularity nearly every week, and with the success of the Dota 2 tournaments, can Valve really go a long time without having one?