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Midway: The Biggest Problem for CS is HLTV
Trevor "Midway" Schmidt gave an interview with fnatic's Cameron "fams" Carson about his work with ESL and GotFrag
Trevor "Midway" Schmidt gave an interview with fantic.com about his work with ESL and GotFrag and how his work with the National ESL and why and how he left GotFrag and it's current state.
When asked about the current state of international eSports, and how north america has been behind in almost every game out there with the exception of Quake live:
"I don’t think it’s so much behind as it is just not well promoted. GotFrag used to be the pillar of promotion in the USA and that was removed, so there is nothing to help promote how successful teams are right now. The fact that coL and EG are still operating at the levels they are without GotFrag shows a lot to their resiliency. On top of that, companies like ESEA are even stronger than they were a few years ago. It’s easy to say the USA is down because they aren’t winning top events, but in reality there just haven’t been as many big events in the USA to win, so it’s harder for those teams to visit Europe and harder for European players to compete here in the US. You also have to take into account that the USA has really spread out its games. Unlike Europe, the USA is very heavy into Console gaming and a lot of our young players are focused on games like Madden, Halo, SF4 etc. Those games are becoming much more interesting for eSports."
He gave his opinion on what happened to his first company, GotFrag.com, and how it's current owners, MLG, are using it:
"I think it’s very sad. When the ownership group sold to MLG, there was an expectation that GotFrag would be used as their arm to compete with CGS. As everyone knows, CGS went under, so the desire and need to do that really fell apart for MLG. I think MLG did a good job in finding value from GotFrag in using it to help build up WoW through acquisitions like the one for MMO-Champion which they recently sold to Curse for a profit. This created massive viewer numbers on their WoW streams at their events. ESEA is currently trying to achieve something similar with ESEA News, but their league is lacking a bit of the glamour American Counter-Strike had back in the days."
And one of his most controversial statements in the entire interview was near the end of it, where he shares his opinion on CS and why it's growth has been shorten significantly by somethign that almost all CS players use to watch games:
"I think the biggest problem with Counter-Strike is HLTV. I know this sounds terrible as many people believe HLTV is the best thing for CS, but the truth is that HLTV has killed the possibility of making CS *the* eSport game. The reason I say this: the hardcore community sees HLTV as the best way to watch CS. There is really no way to advertise inside of HLTV properly. Compare this to to WoW or SC2 which uses streaming video from in-game and it’s so obvious why these games are more suitable for eSports from this point of view. 20k-30k users watch a WoW stream at MLG events, similar numbers for ESL with SC2. If anyone remembers, CS had those same numbers five years ago at CPL events, but those were on HLTV and not streaming video."
"I don’t think it’s so much behind as it is just not well promoted. GotFrag used to be the pillar of promotion in the USA and that was removed, so there is nothing to help promote how successful teams are right now. The fact that coL and EG are still operating at the levels they are without GotFrag shows a lot to their resiliency. On top of that, companies like ESEA are even stronger than they were a few years ago. It’s easy to say the USA is down because they aren’t winning top events, but in reality there just haven’t been as many big events in the USA to win, so it’s harder for those teams to visit Europe and harder for European players to compete here in the US. You also have to take into account that the USA has really spread out its games. Unlike Europe, the USA is very heavy into Console gaming and a lot of our young players are focused on games like Madden, Halo, SF4 etc. Those games are becoming much more interesting for eSports."
He gave his opinion on what happened to his first company, GotFrag.com, and how it's current owners, MLG, are using it:
"I think it’s very sad. When the ownership group sold to MLG, there was an expectation that GotFrag would be used as their arm to compete with CGS. As everyone knows, CGS went under, so the desire and need to do that really fell apart for MLG. I think MLG did a good job in finding value from GotFrag in using it to help build up WoW through acquisitions like the one for MMO-Champion which they recently sold to Curse for a profit. This created massive viewer numbers on their WoW streams at their events. ESEA is currently trying to achieve something similar with ESEA News, but their league is lacking a bit of the glamour American Counter-Strike had back in the days."
And one of his most controversial statements in the entire interview was near the end of it, where he shares his opinion on CS and why it's growth has been shorten significantly by somethign that almost all CS players use to watch games:
"I think the biggest problem with Counter-Strike is HLTV. I know this sounds terrible as many people believe HLTV is the best thing for CS, but the truth is that HLTV has killed the possibility of making CS *the* eSport game. The reason I say this: the hardcore community sees HLTV as the best way to watch CS. There is really no way to advertise inside of HLTV properly. Compare this to to WoW or SC2 which uses streaming video from in-game and it’s so obvious why these games are more suitable for eSports from this point of view. 20k-30k users watch a WoW stream at MLG events, similar numbers for ESL with SC2. If anyone remembers, CS had those same numbers five years ago at CPL events, but those were on HLTV and not streaming video."
Full interview source: