The Eleague Boston Major will start in a couple of days, but the CS GO Community is busy with another topic altogether. On the 18th of January 2018, ESL announced that they are partnering with Facebook for live streaming some of their events for the duration of the next year.

The announcement mentions the ESL Pro League and ESL One as being a part of the deal. This deal grants Facebook exclusive streaming rights to two ESL’s biggest tournaments. There has been a lot of opinionated discussion amongst fans about this deal. Most of it has been negative and surrounding the impact that viewership numbers will face due to this announcement. The deal covers ESL events in CS GO and Dota2 and will definitely impact the entirety of esports. In this article, we will discuss some points that hold true as either for or against the deal.

The announcement

The initial announcement was made on the official website. It got an overwhelming response from the community, which just goes on to show how much the community cares about ESL and almost any decision that they take.

We are happy to announce that Facebook will be our main broadcast partner for the highest level of esports competition – the CS:GO Pro League and the ESL One circuit, with full English and Portuguese coverage, which will be filling your screens exclusively on the Facebook platform and also available on embedded streams on the respective event websites. Facebook has also recently started rolling out features that make watching a collaborative experience, such as their “viewing with friends” features. Now, when tuning into shows on Facebook, you can switch between general chat and private chats with groups of friends who are currently also watching the broadcast. You can also easily invite your friends that aren’t watching yet into your viewing group via Messenger. With many more product innovations on the roadmap for the future, we’re looking forward to Facebook further developing the viewing experience on the platform in 2018.

Official tournament broadcasts will air in both English and Portuguese, with a variety of other language options available. Starting with Dota 2 at ESL One Genting 2018 from January 23-28 and CS:GO Pro League Season 7 on February 13th, non-stop content is coming your way. On top of tournament live streams, we’re excited to utilize Facebook Watch to produce additional broadcasts, such as a weekly show for Dota 2.

You can read the full announcement on the ESL website.

Pros and Cons

Why would ESL go from Twitch to Youtube and now Facebook ? Twitch is the platform where the majority of the viewers are present and we see new viewers regularly come in CS GO due to Twitch’s highlight feature on the front page.

Moving ESL Pro League and ESL One tournaments to facebook has several advantages as well as disadvantages. It’s not black and white and the pros and cons often balance each other out. We will take a look at the various factors and effects of this deal in the article.

The Advantages

The Facebook – ESL is not all gloom and doom. There are so many advantages that we can take away from the deal, which is what endeared ESL towards Facebook. These include better payment for talent, better stages and an outreach towards new viewers and potentially making esports ‘more mainstream’

Higher Prize pools

The Facebook deal is definitely a big monetary deal between ESL and Facebook. The exact amount is not yet public, but Counter-Strike is one of the hottest esport properties on the market right now. However, this deal will enable bigger prize pools for the tournaments. With Prize pools and viewership numbers being two of the most important criteria to judge the growth of esports right now, it is an essential component for the future of esports.

Facebook provides us with a stability in terms of the financial backing while organizing tournaments and planning the finances. With this deal, organizers can have a bigger tournament platform, which hopefully in the future probably even matches that of Dota2.

Longer Events, Better formats

The recent Eleague Boston Major has revived the CS GO Format debate. With the swiss system a relatively better format than the previous Double elimination format, it still needs a lot of work. For starters, a BO1 group stage negates any positive outcome of the Swiss format. But having a BO3 Group stage is equally difficult due to time constraints.

Having more money come into the tournament would ensure the possibility of longer tournament durations. These extra days will be used to ensure Best of Three Group stages, which would ensure the success of the best teams. The number of upsets in a Best of Three Group stage format would be much lower.

More talent

The Eleague Boston Major has come under a lot of flak for not hiring more analysts and talent for the Major. Eleague has always been credited with improving the quality of production and facilities provided to players and talent. But this year, they have hired too few talent for the Major.

The Major spreads over several weeks to the Challengers Stage, the Legends Stage and the Champions Stage. There will be a lot of burnout on the talent, who despite their amazing skills are still human. The Facebook deal will help in hiring more talent and spread out the workload amongst them. This is beneficial to the industry as a whole and will only help in serving viewers the best quality streams.

Increased Promotion

Facebook will bring with it a lot of promotion and advertising opportunities. Despite it’s mostly negative outlook of late, Facebook still boasts one of the highest user numbers in the industry. Esporsts is slowly becoming a lucrative investment opportunity for non-endemic investors. This Facebook deal is a huge push in that direction.

They might not play the game, but CS GO as a game is very general to human nature. It does not have a high learning curve and the basic shoot to kill has been oversimplified in Arcade games in the past. The deal with Facebook brings CS GO to the forefront encourages new viewers to watch the game.

The Disadvantages

The Facebook deal is not without its flaws and disadvantages. The advantages are more towards the business end of tournament organizers and companies. However, the disadvantages seem to cater more towards the viewers and the community that will be watching the streams.

Loss of Viewership

The biggest impact of moving ESL streams to Facebook watch will be the drop in viewership numbers. Viewership numbers are one of the most important metrics for the growth of esports. CS GO has big viewership numbers in esports and a lot of this comes down to Twitch. Esports viewers like Twitch and that is a fact. While actual reasons might vary, we have seen several live streaming platforms come and fail miserably in the past. With names such as Hitbox, Azubu, etc being familiar due to their failed attempts at challenging Twitch in the past; we have seen viewers wanting tournaments to stream on Twitch.

When compared to another esport title, Paladins which saw a big dip in the viewership numbers once the stream moved to facebook we know we are in for lower numbers. How big of an impact will Facebook have on these numbers is still unclear.

Migration away from the community

This is a very specific concern to the ESL-Facebook deal. The general ‘feel’ of the entire community has been a negative one. Most of the fans and viewers have expressed displeasure with the Facebook. The reasons range from the quality of the video to Facebook oppressive and overtly infiltrative software. There are concerns about the whether you will need to probably log into your account in order to view. This would make your identity public, which would take away the anonymity of the Internet. This has since been clarified by ESL and other authorities. They assured us that one does not need a facebook account in order to view the matches.

Business decisions should be decoupled from the popular opinion to a large extent. However, we have seen tournaments suffer due to their decisions being unpopular with the community. This has led to certain tournaments and organizations dying a slow painful death from lack of interest by the community. We hope something like this does not happen in CSGO. But the initial signs of displeasure are evident.

Low-Quality Video

Facebook has a problem with low-quality videos during their live stream. The quality of the live streaming videos in Facebook is extremely buggy and of low quality. We do have certain CS GO players streaming on Facebook due to pre-existing deals with their organizations. We have seen players such as ChrisJ and certain Dignitas players stream on Facebook. It has not been of the best quality so far. There is still scope for Facebook to make massive improvements in their live streaming department. We do hope they end up implementing changes soon.

Lack of Viewership Growth

A concern post the ESL-Facebook deal is that it will move the content away from the target audience. Yes, it will be available to a much larger audience, which technically is the entirety of Facebook. But how many of these Facebook users will be interested in regularly watching and following esports? The actual percentage of user conversions will be much less than the number of viewers lost.This negative community perception would be really something that ESL would love to prove wrong.

People predicted the death of Pro League after it went to Youtube, and the most recent finals had record viewership. I encourage everyone to give this the benefit of the doubt and just wait for what the viewing experience will be. — Ulrich Schulze (@theflyingdj) January 18, 2018

It’s still too early to judge or predict any possible outcome of the ESL-Facebook Deal. It has it’s advantages, while also sacrificing on some fronts. ESL was one of the first big tournaments organizers to move away from the monopoly of Twitch last year. They switched to Youtube Gaming and survived. Only time will tell us whether this deal with Facebook will help esports grow.

ESL One will first be broadcast on Facebook during ESL One Genting 2018, starting on January 23rd followed by the ESL Pro League starting February 13th, 2018.

Source :

ESL