Throughout the history of Gaming, the competitive online multiplayer shooters have always been a mainstay for the Pc community. Games like Crisis and the original counter strike kept gamers glued to their chairs for years. However, starting in the early 2010’s the new Phenomenon of E-sports was on the rise. With the newest and most refined version of Counterstrike ever, players began to enjoy the competitive online scene, while also taking notice of the new E-sport that was developing. Flash Foreword 8-10 years from this position and then you will see a very similar rise of a competitive pc multiplayer shooter in the rise of Valorant.
CS:GO
I can still remember in 2011-2015 during the peak of CS:GO’s popularity. The game was everywhere not only was it one of the most popular games in the world in terms of player base, but it had grown a different type of fan. With the introduction of the CSGO marketplace a whole new extra dimension of content was added into the game. Players within the game could now buy and sell cosmetic items, like skins for weapons, to other players in the game. This meant that essentially an entire capitalistic system with bear markets and bull markets, crashes and scams all entered the scene around at the same time. Along with all of this came a new breed of player that rarely even played the game but instead was obsessed with gathering and selling skins as a sort of mock capitalism. It made the games fanbase rather interesting as a large portion barley played the game and was more concerned with the collection side of the game that was offered. This was only worsened with the introduction of loot boxes and keys. Essentially players could now, separately buy boxes and then buy keys to those boxes in order to gamble on a chance of getting rare skins. Most of the time buying these boxes was like throwing money in a fire and buying the skin that you want directly would always be cheaper but, in every box, there was a 0.1 percent chance of perhaps opening a knife. These knives skins were extremely rare and valuable with the best ones going for 500-600 dollars depending on grade and if it stat tracked or not. All of this combined to offer up and extremely complex culture surrounding CS:GO. Initially the game had a very dedicated and loyal base that consistently played the game for the love of the game, and this sustained the games life. However, over time with the Introduction of E-sports teams, Skins, Gambling, and things like surfing the fanbase of the game became very diluted. Less and less people were playing the competitive multiplayer aspect of the game and more players were spending time in the ad on’s meant to retain the player base. What this would eventually mean is that over time around 2016 and 2017 people began to lose interest in all the extra bells and whistles offered by CSGO. The market for all the items began to crash which saw a rush of selling which only furthered the crash. The E-sports teams that used to be so popular began to lose steam as players stopped being interested in the older CS:GO and began to become interested into new E-Sport games like Overwatch, Rocket League, and League of Legends. The player bases had been waning for many years as CS:Go finally seemed to be on its last legs. This is also right around the time frame when a certain RIOT game would beginning to see the gap In the market and work on their newest game which would eventually become Valorant.
Valorant
With the Inevitable Death of CS:GO looming very clearly on the horizon RIOT games the makers of the massively popular League of Legends. The leaders at RIOT saw and remembered the vast popularity that CS:GO held at its peak and they sought to recreate that popularity for their new title. E-Sports were as popular as they had ever been and only seemed to be a growing field. Wanting to crash in on all this business potential Riot finally completed their CS:GO competitor in Valorant. The games was extremely similar to CS:GO in a lot of ways related to the gameplay. However, where Valorant distinguished itself is the introduction of certain playable characters or operatives each having a special ability that gamers can take advantage of. Whether it’s a teleporting ability or a way to see through walls each character’s special ability offered up an infinite amount of replayablitly as there were always new strategies to try out each on the different playable characters. This was the biggest thing that distinguished Valorant from CS:GO because without this distinction Valorant essentially operated as a new school CS:GO just with updated maps. A large Majority of the players that used to mainline grind CS:GO are now a part of the newly thriving Valorant player base. As well as a large majority of pro players on E-Sports Organizations. CS:GO has seen a massive exodus of pro players leaving the scene due to lack of interest and funding. The most natural landing spot for all these players is a game like valorant where their skills are transferable. This also applies to fans of the old esports teams that have since fallen off in terms of relevance. Essentially every game(besides Minecraft) is destined to have a lifespan of relevance and a time of death or falling off. This has been the cycle present within gaming for 30 years there is constant recycling and composting of content.
