Cologne – After the ESL Championship in Counter-Strike mainly stagnated in the pandemic, a merger with the 99Damage league was supposed to set up the league for the future. But No Limit Gaming is disappointed after the first – Season – and sees black for the future of the league.

“We had ten full-time teams in the league, all putting money into Counter-Strike because we hoped that something big would come up in the future,” says NLG founder and CEO Stefan Schillhabel in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

But too little money has come back from the scene, he says, because interest is too low: “I hardly know any people who voluntarily do German Counter-Strike.”

ESL championship: NLG only with hobby team

The organization had taken over a spot in the league in early 2019, making it one of the younger teams. A full-time paid lineup would be too expensive in the future.

Earlier this year, organizers ESL and Freaks 4U Gaming had merged their two German Counter-Strike leagues. Since then, Freaks 4U from Berlin-Spandau has been the organizer. And Schillhabel accuses the latter of focusing more on other games – such as League of Legends or Valorant. “Counter-Strike is sort of the unloved child that you sort of sit out. It’s like you’re planning to close up store at some point.”

But the league can’t be the biggest source of revenue for teams, counters Sprout manager Daniel Paulus. “You have a lot of opportunities to generate awareness and reach. And it’s then up to the organizations themselves to go down those paths and be successful there in some way,” he says in an interview with dpa. To do that, teams would have to compete in international e-sports tournaments in particular in order to be interesting for sponsors.

Counter-Strike: Player salaries while Corona explodes

From the point of view of Lennart Kreuter, project manager at Alternate Attax, the salaries in the German scene are often too high for this. “If you sign a team, it generates success and reach for you, and that’s how you acquire sponsors,” he said in an interview with dpa. “If the players say I want this and that, but don’t deliver anything in return, then you have no way of acquiring sponsors.”

Teams from other countries are often more successful in international competition despite lower salaries, Paulus adds.

Criticism of the ESL Championship livestream

Schillhabel also directed criticism primarily at the quality of the live broadcasts, which had fallen short of expectations with faulty graphics, for example. The organizers would ignore feedback, some errors were not fixed to this day.

“If you address something eight times and there’s never anything back, then at some point you stop criticizing,” Schillhabel says. He also says there is too little reporting on 99Damage’s website. Freaks 4U says that everyone involved always has the opportunity to provide feedback. There is a close exchange of ideas.

Sprout and Attax partly agree with NLG’s criticism. “I talked to people from ESL, Freaks 4U and other teams because I thought the – Season was disastrous myself. And everyone was totally dissatisfied,” Paul says. “Somehow the solution didn’t come. And what was the reason for that? In the end, only Freaks 4U can probably say that.” He points out, however, that those responsible for him have been open to criticism at all times.

LoL League Prime League becomes a role model

The fact that the ESL Championship, for example, lags behind the League of Legends league Prime League, also organized by Freaks 4U and financially supported by developer Riot Games, is hardly surprising from Alternate’s point of view.

“It needs to be made clearer to fans that it’s just logical that the ESL Championship doesn’t have the same budget,” Kreuter says. “You can’t rent a studio with two casters, two analysts and a moderator, something like that doesn’t work on its own.”

Schillhabel, however, believes that a similar level of service is achievable with the right commitment to event organizers. “The product you’ve created with the Prime League could be built if you invested and took risks for a change,” Schillhabel says. Then it could succeed without the financial support of a publisher. “If the viewer numbers are right, then you’ll be able to attract sponsors there, too.”

Organizer wants to improve financing

Freaks 4U, on the other hand, points to the already existing expenses. “Large sums of money are invested by organizers to realize weekly live broadcasts or to implement a studio final in Berlin, as was the case most recently,” the company explains in a statement. “We are currently working on various models to improve the monetization of the league.”

While NLG will only field one unpaid team in the league going forward, Sprout and Alternate Attax are sticking with the ESL Championship. “I don’t think the baby is in the well yet in any case, but it’s sitting on the edge like that,” Kreuter said of the state of the league. “We’re at ground zero, but if everyone pulls together, I’m convinced it can be salvaged.”

Paul also believes in improvement: “That it’s unacceptable and has to change, we all know that and I firmly believe that it will all go a lot better next – Season .” dpa