Carmac: "It's very much going to be the same ESL and FACEIT, and if it's not, then we should absolutely be judged for that"

ESL's VP of Product Development Michal "Carmac" Blicharz spoke to HLTV.org to talk about the future of ESL FACEIT Group after the acquisition by the Savvy Gaming Group.

News broke on Monday of the merger between two of the most important companies in Counter-Strike’s esports ecosystem, as ESL and FACEIT became the ESL FACEIT Group. But what made it controversial was not just the consolidation of two big actors in the game’s competitive circuit, it was the fact that the two companies were acquired by the Savvy Gaming Group, a company based out of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and owned by the Gulf country’s Public Investment Fund. The opaque state-run fund that made headlines in 2021 when it bought the English Premier League’s Newcastle United Football Club, skyrocketing the team as one of the world’s richest overnight and angering the other 19 Premiership sides who claimed the league’s image would be tarnished, while also causing widespread backlash from both the sporting community as well as human rights advocates.

The ESL FACEIT Group was purchased by the PIF’s Savvy Gaming Group for a reported sum of $1.5 billion, an astronomical figure that some have questioned as wildly overvalued — Modern Times Group’s majority stake in ESL cost $78 million in 2015 — and is reminiscent of the deals that another one of the PIF’s businesses, a planned smart city and tourist destination in northwestern Saudi Arabia known as Neom, tried to make in esports by sponsoring Riot’s LEC and BLAST with reportedly very lucrative sums. Those deals fell through, however, as condemnation from the community and many of its figureheads, particularly broadcast talent, made both of the aforementioned companies backpedal in their commitment to advertise the city project, which has been marred in controversy over forced evictions of the native Howeitat people inhabiting the region.

As of now it is hard to tell exactly how this acquisition will affect ESL and FACEIT, who had been in talks to merge for months before it was known that the Cologne-based tournament organizer would end up in the hands of the PIF, meaning that the consolidation of two of Counter-Strike’s biggest esports pillars was already in motion. “I was not a part of the talks for the merger, but if you look at FACEIT and ESL, it's quite obvious that we have distinct strengths in contrasting areas and if you put them together it becomes a full package,” Michal “Carmac” Blicharz, VP of Product Development at ESL, says. “If you look from a Counter-Strike perspective it makes sense, but if you look from an 'any game' perspective it makes tremendous sense. We can offer community tools, match making, anti-cheat, game hubs, online leagues, game festivals and tournaments all under one roof. All of a sudden it's all part of an ecosystem that you can activate almost overnight. That's where the value comes from.”

Consolidation in Counter-Strike has always been a touchy subject, as many of the game’s stalwarts have been big proponents of the open nature of the tournament circuit, with different companies putting together their events with minimal if any intervention from Valve, the game’s intellectual property owners. But FACEIT, who used to run their ECS tournament series, worked with ELEAGUE in their short-lived foray into Counter-Strike, and were behind the production for the Flashpoint league, have shown their real value rest in their pick-up game ecosystem, from their grassroots hubs to the elite level FACEIT Pro League, as well as their community-building. Tournament organizing has been a tough circuit to fight in, however, and any loss in competitors should be mourned, especially considering that the space has not been at its strongest with other players like StarLadder taking a big step back in 2021 as the Russian TO only had a single RMR event to their name while ESL and BLAST coveted most of the calendar outside of Valve-sanctioned tournaments.

“In Counter-Strike we have a publisher that historically has suggested that they don't want a monopoly,” Carmac says. “I'm not talking only about CS:GO, Valve have a philosophy of open market across everything they do, not just CS:GO. We're not trying to go for a monopoly, the immediate plan for the ESL Pro Tour isn't going to change at all regarding the number of tournaments or the days in the calendar. ESL Pro League is not suddenly going to double in length. Our immediate plan is to open up much more and to improve what we have as much as possible. If we're being honest with each other there are areas in which we're behind relative to our competitors in the space. For instance, BLAST has done highly polished and entertaining broadcasts. We need to catch up, and that's our immediate focus, to actually get back to being an amazingly polished, well-rounded, and entertaining show.”

One way ESL is going to open up, according to Carmac, is by changing the way teams make it to their two most prestigious events in the calendar, IEM Katowice and IEM Cologne. ESL Pro Tour points will no longer be used to qualify teams for them, and instead, invites will first be given to ESL Pro Tour Masters tournament champions, and then the remaining slots will be decided by ESL's world ranking. While the change will simplify the format and make it easier for spectators to follow storylines, it is still just a partial opening as teams winning events outside of the ESL ecosystem won't get direct invites to Katowice or Cologne the way those that win, for example, IEM Dallas or an ESL Pro League season. Carmac notes that, in the future, non-EPT tournaments might be considered for invites too, if certain standards are met.

The more thorny aspects of the acquisition, however, are not the ones related to the merger between FACEIT and ESL, but rather those concerning the Saudi PIF entering Counter-Strike by holding the biggest grassroots and tournament organizing group and if they will be able to exert their influence in the space. “Savvy is a business entity that is expected, at the end of the day, to create long term value in gaming and esports,” Carmac says, mirroring a similar statement by FACEIT’s Co-Founder, Michele Attisani, on The Four Horsemen. “It's a real business, with real consumers that are interested in the product, so the end-goal is that the actual product is good, there’s no other goal. For that reason, the same people are staying in charge as have been in charge of FACEIT and ESL and the target is to put out the best product possible with the same strategy that has worked for both of our companies in the last decade or so.

“Obviously some backlash was expected,” Carmac adds in regards the acquisition, “but ultimately what we expect is to be judged by what we do and what our products look like. There are many questions about whether we'll stop doing this or that, but the values of the company remain the same, the code of conduct remains the same, the reason we do things, the people running things, the way we think, it all remains the same. It's very much going to be the same ESL and FACEIT, and if it's not, then we should absolutely be judged for that.”

“We are free to operate the way we choose to and we will continue to operate the way we have, with the same values. I don't think we would welcome any kind of pressure to change our code of conduct or the values we have, that's not what the management wants and the management would probably resist it, although this is purely theoretical because there has been no such pressure — but if there was I believe there would be strong resistance.”

The backlash from the Riot and BLAST announcements could raise questions about how Valve would react to news of the biggest CS:GO operator’s acquisition, although seemingly they are uninvolved with the deal. “With most big things that we do we always try to give Valve a heads up about what we're doing, how we're thinking, and why we're doing certain things,” Carmac says. “In these conversations Valve typically give me the impression that we're free to do whatever we want or what we think is best for our business so long as it doesn't clash with the interests of the average Counter-Strike player or fan. They have given us no indication that would happen in regards to our announcement.”

For now, ESL will continue to work on their long term projects, and no longer being a publicly-traded company, along with a cash injection that will help build said long term projects, the company is looking to improve several areas ranging from the broadcast to further cementing the path to pro as well as helping smaller regions flourish. “The biggest change is that now we're not a publicly-traded company anymore so we don't have the pressures we had from that,” Carmac says. “Financial results from quarter to quarter, making sure the short-term is looking healthy as opposed to having a very long view of the business. This should help us focus on the long-term vision of our products and ultimately improve our products for the players who play every day and for the viewers who want to see the world's best players doing the most amazing things on the biggest stages.”

For Carmac, the importance of keeping Counter-Strike relevant is to keep a constant flow of players coming up the ranks to challenge for spots in the big teams, and then for titles on the biggest stages. “Without new players developing we will not have Counter-Strike five to 10 years from now. If you want to build an ecosystem with the biggest longevity, that's where you begin. So for us, the investment is in connecting all of the platforms and the products so that if your 15 or 16-year-old cousin starts a FACEIT account, he or she will clearly know what the path to becoming the next s1mple and m0NESY is. That's our vertical focus.”

The horizontal focus is regional, making sure this happens not only in Europe, but also in the rest of the world. “This way we ensure Counter-Strike as an entertainment and a sport being a global show attracting people from all over the world,” Carmac says. “We know how important North America is in all of this, so we're paying extra attention there because we know how the ‘Europe vs. North America’ narrative has driven Counter-Strike from the times of the first NiP, SK, compLexity, etc. All of those rivalries have been very good for Counter-Strike and we want to make sure that the two historically strong continents remain strong and that the rest catch up.”

An example of how ESL hopes to help the North American region, for instance, is in provisions added to the Louvre Agreement, no longer incentivising only good results but also things such as having players living and playing in North America. The idea is that this will not only cater to the North American fanbase, but also to Challenger-level players who will be able to have better practice, improve, and keep the cycle going. Another part of the plan is to inject cash into the lower rungs of competition, something seen with the cash cups, which are an extra incentive to try and keep players who grind 12 hours a day and don’t see any returns to stay motivated and continue to work on becoming good enough to make the pros.

“Balancing a product in a highly competitive eco-system and balancing the books of a publicly-traded company is very hard and requires compromise and now that compromise isn't necessarily needed,” Carmac says, “I'm happy that the company is private again, the gloves are off.” But stress is on long-term goals and on not creating an unsustainable bubble. “People should expect gradual, intelligent improvements to our products across the board. We want our broadcasts to be better than what they have been. We want to tell better stories around players and make sure that it's not just about the one guy that wins everything. If you've seen Drive to Survive, you know how interesting the stories of someone who wants to break through can be. It's interesting to see how the stories of those trying to make it are often much more compelling than the stories of those who have made it and are winning everything.

“Expect us to make sure that our broadcast is strong. I don't find that we have been ahead of BLAST in the last year in terms of some of the broadcasting, so we want to catch up. We want to show our own flavor on how to deliver great events and expect the first signs of that to start showing at IEM Katowice. This is not just a change from driving a Skoda yesterday to driving a Mercedes today. It's now one company with a long-term plan — and I do mean long term —, and I mention the long term because the idea is to create something sustainable that lasts beyond the career of a single player. But in the short term, obviously, we want to address any issues that have been annoyances to the audience or to our user base.

“The B stream at events, for example. Has it always been amazing? No. The reason we have it is because we believe it is better for Counter-Strike to have events that are larger than eight teams. You can have fantastic quality if you narrow it down to eight teams and focus on that because you don't have to run two parallel productions, but we believe it's important to give access to more participants because we believe it's better for the ecosystem overall. But that means we need a second stream and the resources were too stretched to make that B stream experience feel polished enough that we would be as proud of it as we could be, so that's the kind of thing we're going to be looking to fix. We want to retain the ambitious goal of retaining that value, because if only eight teams compete then only eight teams derive value from that event. If 16 teams compete, that's double the number of teams that can show value to sponsors, justify salaries for players and so on and so forth. The cost of that was that the quality in the B stream wasn't the one we would be proud of necessarily because we just didn't have the resources to make it so. Now it's one of the areas we will be addressing. That's one of the examples.”

Going private again and having the resources to make a better product is a promising proposition, especially in the near future, but will taking money from the PIF one day come and haunt the ESL FACEIT Group? Could it be that a day will come in which a list of cities that must be included in the IEM or ESL Pro League circuits will be handed down to the tournament operator? How about a LAN final in the project city of Neom?

“Geopolitics is not my thing, but as I understand it, Saudi Arabia wants to shift its economy from oil to something else,” Carmac explains his view on the matter. “We haven't suddenly become a promotion vehicle, this is just a shifting of their economy from natural resources to technology, so it's primarily a business investment from a group that wants to be a valuable part of gaming and esports.”

Regardless, it’s impossible to know what the future truly holds. At this point all one can do is hope that the acquisition of the ESL FACEIT Group remains strictly a business decision and that, if Counter-Strike starts heading the way of traditional sports where sportswashing (an individual, group, nation-state, etc. using sport to improve its reputation and public image) has become commonplace, that the community will once again come to the fore and speak out.