I'm gonna be honest, I had almost completely forgotten about the Counter-Strike "competitive scene" in recent times, or blissfully blocked it out of my general sphere of knowledge. Probably because I hate what "competitive E-sports" have done to the gaming industry as a whole, and that CS:GO, much like TF2 with its lootcrates, just ended up being a forboding warning we all pleasantly ignored that heavily hinted at what was to come a decade down the line in terms of the enshittification of the hobby in general.
The NA E-sports scene for this game, having gone extinct, with a scarce few remnants wandering around the slowly crumbling CS Empire, isn't too surprising considering Counter Strike's "Golden Age" has been over for almost a decade now. Once that foolishly optimistic push from companies to make 'competitive gaming' into an actually viable career option and a sustainable 'cash cow' for them to profit off had failed around the end of the 2010s, there went the NA competitive side of things. Since most of the actually talented players either left, retired, or went to greener pastures in terms of finding themselves a 'niche' that wouldn't end up with them struggling to pay bills and getting early onset arthritis over a fringe 'sport' that no longer had an established structure to actually help them build or maintain a real 'career' off of, at least here in the States.
Congrats to those German Newgens calling themselves BIG for their win. The European countries of the world need to eke out as many 'wins' as they can get nowadays, in any self-proclaimed sport that they can get their hands on. Though, preferably ones that won't end up with their major cities being burned to the ground by hordes of melinated holigans due to them losing or even winning *cough* Paris *cough*. I do wonder how the CS scene in general will look within another five years, as it really starts to hit its decline. Will it just be a bunch of South American monkeys and Russian mudaks keeping the corpse of modern Counter Strike alive like they do every other dead early to mid 2000s game? Only time will tell, I suppose. Cука блядь!
