Hopeful future

It's not everyday that I get to be pretty positive about eSports, and counter-strike in particular. In the last year the whole CS scene basically collapsed - with only 2 real tournaments in the whole year so far. To put it in perspective, we had roughly 6 by this time last year. And we had an equal number coming up in the second half. Plus the online leagues and smaller tournaments around the world. However with CSGO coming out it seems that things have actually gone better than i ever expected them to - i had made relatively arrogant comments on twitter to pus, thorin and lurppis about how half of the 1.6 community would switch and all the tournaments would too etc etc etc. But damn even more than have seemed to.

So lets recap what's happened in the last month and a half:

• Almost every single professional north american team's players are playing CSGO in ESEA and it looks like the interest is there at both the midlevel and the lower level of competition
• ESWC's NA tournament is HUGE, featuring over 700 teams
• ESL's Go4CSGO cup has a pretty solid attendance of 30+ teams ever week with several thousand(even 10-15K on one of the finals that I watched) watching the stream
• EPS germany(the premier tournament in germany AND the flagship of ESL's online leagues) has switched to CSGO
• NiP, with heaton at the helm, is back featuring 3 1.6ers(including 2 of the best ever, f0rest and get_right) and 2 source kids.
• It looks like the golden 5 are going all in with CSGO
• Fnatic appears to be switching as cArn as stated that they will be "playing multiple CS titles"
• Two CoD teams have switched, holdmouse1 in NA and kola eSports in EU
• Natu is switching with a finnish team
• Dignitas, EG and coL have all shown various levels of interest in CSGO - with dignitas being the most interested in picking up a team
• Almost every source team is switching or will be switching in the near future
• It appears that most of the 1.6 community seems receptive to CSGO and have seen the changes in recent patches as major steps in the right direction in terms of competition
• Dreamhack will feature a CSGO tournament
• Numerous top level pros are streaming
• Numerous top level pros are tweeting
• HLTV's news feed is mostly CSGO related
• r/global offensive is gaining thousands of subs - going from 4 thousand last week to over 7 thousand this week.
• CSGO's recent patches have made the game better than ever
• CSGO is the most popular version of CS on steam
• Volcano's de_nuke_ve shows how fast the community can create better versions of the map than valve can

However i can't feel like some minor slights and problems with CSGO

• When asked about FPS games both sundance of MLG and david ting of IPL have shown more interests or outright confirmed little to no interest in CSGO
• IEM have shown no interest in CSGO
• Matchmaking still sucks in CSGO
• not a lot of people are really watching CSGO streams despite the fact that more people are streaming CS than ever before
• The clan matches which were supposed to be in CSGO appear not to be occuring
• The spectating tools have not been implemented, although the CSGO developers have stated that they  were waiting on DoTA2's spectating client to base thiers off of
• The major content providers in the beta, corey dunn, whisenhunt and ESEAnews have slowed significantly - essentially slowing the growth of CSGO's personality/content creation growth.
• the game still doesn't have a silencer(LOOK AND ME AND MY NITPICKINESS)
• Matchmaking doesn't make use of the _se versions of the map and volcano's _ve version of nuke

It looks like a major mixed bag. Mostly good, yes, but without one of the two major tournament circuits in north america(IPL or MLG) or the many houses that CS built(IEM, WCG) picking up the game,  I seriously doubt that CSGO will get the coverage or the respect that it should in the higher echelons of eSports. No matter how good a game is(as seen in quake live), if people don't watch it it won't last. Furthermore it looks like some of the problems of CS's past might come back stronger than ever now if we dont' fix them immediately, but that's a topic for another time.