Counter-Strike is dying, and We Should Let it

It has been two decades since the first Counter-Strike was released to our desktops and with it came two decades of high octane fast-paced competitive gaming. With four installments over the last 20 odd years, it quickly grew a cult-like following and with becoming one of the most popular E-sports games. With good reason too, the adrenaline rush and satisfaction you get from flicking heads and clutching a 1v5 round is nonpareil. So much so that some folks can spend hours watching other people play. Witnessing the skill of players like shroud or s1mple can give you that same heart-racing experience as playing yourself.

Counter-Strike has done a lot for the world of competitive gaming, but it is not without its issues. Namely, the community of the game can be rather toxic, from berating for a bad flashbang to cussing you out for not clutching around. Honestly, if that was the only toxic trait of the game it wouldn't be so bad. There is also rampant sexism and racism especially among the young adult demographic. I have heard many horror stories of what women go through while playing online and have experienced firsthand 16-year-old screaming the N-word into their mic more times than I can count. It is something that has been brought up numerous times over the years and still, Valve doesn't seem to do much when these players get reported. Unfortunately, Counter-strikes has other problems as well.

I’m sure many people remember the CS:GO lottery scandal, but in case you don’t I will explain it. A few years ago, a couple of Counter-Strike content creators promoted a weapons skin lottery website. Users could log in and open cases for varying amounts with the chance to extremely valuable skins and knives. Which sounds like fun right? Well, it would be, but the creators pushing the website were also the owners. They were never public about owning the website, they just encouraged their viewers ( which had a large number of children under 18) to spend money on the site. Promoting gambling to children is already a red flag in my opinion but it gets worse. Since these creators were the owners they could rig the outcome of the case opening, so in their videos they made it seem like getting a knife with a 2 dollar case or 5 dollar case is super common. It wasn't. That is how they made their money, by misleading young viewers to drop large amounts of cash into their site.

The Chernobyl levels of toxicity aren’t the only thing that is killing Counter-Strike. After two decades of basically the same gameplay mechanics with no significant change to play style, people get bored. There are only so many new maps you can add and only so many skins before people just get tired of it. If you look at the numbers since last year the concurrent player count has dropped by almost half, 1.3 million to approximately 700K at the time of writing this. Even Overwatch has more daily players, and people have been calling that a dead game for quite some time. I have no doubt however that it will always remain at least a small solid fan base, and I don't think that the E-sports world will move completely away from it. As far as the casual gamer goes, however, it seems clear (to me) that Counter-Strike is in its twilight years.

So you might be asking, what IS the next big competitive shooter? Well, I will tell dear reader! Due to current viewers on twitch and concurrent player count, it seems Valorant is on the rise. With over double the viewers on twitch and roughly 25% higher player numbers than its senior counterpart (see what I did there?) Bad puns aside Valorant is currently dominating the competitive world and I believe is only going to keep growing. It feels fresh, yet familiar at the same time which makes transitioning from games like counter-strike relatively painless.

It is no surprise that Valorant has had the success it has, after all, Riot Games have played a large role in the E-sports ring for some time now. League of legends for example is Riot’s flagship title and has held a strong player base for the better part of a decade. So when they broke into the realm of the FPS I knew it was going to be great. A strong pedigree isn't the only thing that made players excited about Valorant however. If that was a deciding factor at all even.

In my opinion, one of the foremost reasons for Valorant’s success is accessibility. It is free to play and you don’t have to pay for anything except for cosmetics. Even a few of those you can get for free from the free chapter rewards in the battle pass. Aside from monetary accessibility, the game is lightweight coming in under 10 gigabytes, and doesn’t demand many resources from your CPU or GPU. This makes it perfect for people who don’t want to or canty afford to get a high-end rig and can easily be played on a family computer, as long as you have internet of course.

It certainly helps that the game has taken on a new flavor to a classic recipe. Instead of only gunplay, players can choose from 16 different agents with unique abilities to best match their play style. If you want to get high kills and desecrate your enemy you can play a duelist, Or perhaps you prefer a more hands-off approach so you might choose a sentinel or a controller. No matter how you choose to play every round is guaranteed to be interesting and depending on how you use your abilities you could change the outcome of every game.

With competitive games it is a common issue for toxicity to infest the community, tensions are high and everyone just wants that W. This is especially true with Valorant’s sister game League of Legends, so much so that plenty of people make memes about it. With Valorant however, it seems (in my experience at least) that the community is much more friendly and even helpful. That isn’t to say that I haven’t witnessed plenty of sexism and shit-talking, especially in ranked mode, but it does appear to be slightly less common than in other E-sport games.

Counter-Strike is no longer the standard for what an FPS E-sport should be. It has been overshadowed by battle royale games and games like Valorant. It isn’t even just the fault of the game with the lack of diversity but rather the community around it. You cant expect to talk shit to every new player and run scams on the younger more gullible fans and expect it to stay at number 1. Eventually, people get sick of it and move on, and that is exactly what they are doing and they are right to.