At the Esports Championship Series press event, Cloud9 owner Jack Etienne posed the situation that the CSGO scene may be becoming too overcrowded, and that the CSGO boosting team may consider cutting back their involvement with leagues to one or two.
"It's a very complicated thing because there's a lot of moving pieces,"Etienne said. "While we're doing these preparations with FACEIT, we can sit down with the players and decide when they'd prefer to take breaks and communicate that to the league. I think one of the interesting things is that there are a ton of leagues going on - are we approaching the point where there's too many? Are we at the point where the sponsorship money is spread so thin between leagues that it's not actually benefitting the players? Would it be better for us to cut back and focus on one or two leagues (like ECS and our PEA for example) and get more money from our fixed pool of sponsor dollars, allowing them to have less games being played but making more money?"
But then the problem becomes - what to drop? After all, not participating in any of these league leaves quite alot of money on the table for the players.
"That's where I want to go. But, then the discussion of which league to drop comes up, and we decide, okay, let's drop these leagues," Etienne continued. "But then the players say 'but wait, there's money there' [room laughs]. So we're still in discussions trying to figure out what's good for everyone."
Cloud9 rifler Jordan 'Nothing' Gilbert knows that his team and organizers aren't looking to overwork him - and that it's a difficult situation for all involved. But sometimes, the players just have to stick up for themselves.
"From a player's perspective, the hardest thing for us seeing that the teams and organizers all want to help us but they have multiple facets to their businesses to consider," N0thing said. "What we end up having to do is put our foot down. This year, we ended having to say csgo accounts, no we're not playing at this time - we created a player sanction that no, we won't play in tournaments during August so we have a break. Even if you have a tournament, that's cool, these top 12 teams aren't going to go. I think there was one European event that did, but it did give the tier 2 teams a chance to compete so that was nice. This year we decided on a week in summer, and a week at Christmas time. There's so many forces in esports right now that we just needed to all get on the same page, which is why what ECS and PEA are doing are nice, just coordinating better. It doesn't seem like anyone wants us to play 365 days a year - but its no one's fault but all of ours collectively."
With the amount of money on the table for players every year (and it seems like it's being increased daily), it can be very tempting to go hard all the time. But the important thing that players have to remember is mental and physical health are very important and giving yourself time away from the game is important to keeping your skills sharp too - almost as much as consistent practice and competition.
