Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – An eventful week

Written by Aman Parmar

The ESWC fever caught up real quick, not only because some of the most decorated names in Counter-Strike were about to square off against each other, but because of the legacy of ESWC as a melting pot for teams hailing from different nations that have been taking each other out on Valve’s battlefields all these years. Top that up with the anticipation attached to CS:GO with many eyes waiting to hop onto the live streams and evaluate the current state of the game just to see how well their acceptance mechanism responds to it.

Valve had other plans though as they announced that CS:GO would be free-to-play during the ESWC 2012 World Finals which have concluded with NiP taking home the first prize by beating VeryGames in the grand final. The announcement came as a surprise to many but Valve were pretty serious about it. In their quest to fine-tune CS:GO, Valve had been working closely with ESWC organizers and used the opportunity to get firsthand feedback from the professional players about the overall state of the game. The game was free-to-play from Thursday (18:00) to Sunday (21:00). Earlier during the week, Valve had released an update that brought along the much hyped spectator client - GO TV. The tournament was casted live in English, French and German and crossed more than 20,000 viewers combined on the ESWC English, French & German stage streams, GreatFrag Stream, ESEA Stream, along with Russian, Ukrainian, m0e and Vakarm French Stream.

Valve’s timing was spot on as many people had been hesitant to buy the game right after it’s Aug 21 release without testing how it looked and felt like. This was their chance and they made the most out of it as the numbers suggested a huge spike in an otherwise mellow player base since its launch. The number of active players crossed the 50,000 mark.

Looking at the stats from last week, the response to the F2P was still somewhat cold as many people did not know about the announcement but over the weekend, the numbers jumped really high compared to what they've been in the recent past.

CS:GO has had a mixed response from the community. Thanks to these 1vs.5 clutch videos, the essence of Counter-Strike still seems to be pretty much alive.

Na’Vi to try out CS:GO

Na’Vi fielded its Dota 2 team at the ESWC World Finals in Paris this weekend and clinched the first prize. However, their Counter-Strike team still hasn’t switched over unlike the other professional teams/players. Aleksander “ZeroGravity” Kokhanovsky sat down for an interview with ESPlanet’s Casper Ackermann and cleared up the team’s current mindset about CS:GO. He also stated that the fans shouldn't yet expect Na’Vi to show up at the upcoming DreamHack Winter tournament with their CS: GO contingent. However, he definitely hinted at a possibility of entering the GO scene depending on how the team responds to the game.

Na’Vi were last seen competing in Counter-Strike 1.6 at the PGS 2012 where they clinched the 2^nd place and €4,000 in prize money.

Sources: SteamGraph, HLTV.org, ESPlanet