As the coronavirus (COVID-19) has continued to spread around the world, businesses have had to make monumental shifts in short periods of time, including canceling travel, enacting strict work-from-home policies and, in some cases, shutting down completely. The leagues that host Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competitions are no different.
On Monday, Los Angeles-based Flashpoint -- one of two leading leagues in esports' second-most-popular game -- announced it would transition to an online competition format, moving away from the studio the league used in the first week of play on Friday through Sunday. Its competitor league, the ESL Pro League, took similar measures on March 11, shifting from its plans to compete in Malta to dividing the league into two regions, North America and Europe.
Flashpoint's decision comes on the heels of other esports leagues moving online and traditional sports leagues in the United States, including the NBA, NHL and MLB, postponing their seasons as COVID's impact on the United States and Europe has become more widely recognized.
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No one will argue against the decision made by Flashpoint and the ESL Pro League to move to a play-from-home format, but Flashpoint running its first week in a studio in Los Angeles stood out as a surprise. It was the only offline league operating throughout the weekend, as others, such as the League of Legends Championship Series and League of Legends European Championship, postponed in-person play and prepared to move online.
Flashpoint analyst Duncan "Thorin" Shields made comments over the weekend, in now-deleted tweets, about the league's status as the "only LAN competition in esports," and mocked ESL for its inevitable ping delay from competing online.
By the time Flashpoint went live Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom had already declared a state of emergency nine days earlier. On Sunday, the Centers for Disease Control advised against gatherings of more than 50 people, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered the closing of all dine-in restaurants and entertainment venues. Flashpoint executives, on Monday, made their decision to move online.
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"We took it, what we thought was one step further at the very beginning of the outbreak, we had a closed facility, obviously no fans," Gen.G co-founder and Flashpoint director Kent Wakeford told ESPN. "We had limited staff, all wearing protective gear. No one from the outside. Every team was only allowed their players, a coach and one other. An on-site nurse and a cleaning crew that would clean after every match and before every match and sterilize everything. Hand sanitizers, a nurse to take temperatures of everyone coming in and out. But even with those precautions, we made the decision that that was not enough."
Flashpoint and ESL will be faced with a lot of decisions going forward in terms of how to operate amid the coronavirus pandemic. Both have canceled their finals events: ESL's was set for Denver, and Flashpoint's was scheduled for Stockholm.
ESL had to alter the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship tournament in Katowice, Poland -- considered the cream of the crop of esports competitions -- in February to have no live audience. Then they canceled their ESL One Dota 2 Major in March in Los Angeles. After the removal of fans from Katowice and the cancellation of the Dota Major, ESL knew what it had to do in regard to Pro League.
"It was just the sense of what we call 'storm chasing.' If you've ever seen 'Twister' or something like that, we just felt like we were trying to outrun the tornado," ESL global chief strategy officer Craig Levine told ESPN. "At some point, seeing how this was impacting many of our colleagues' lives in Europe a little bit earlier than that up here in the U.S., we just kind of saw the way this was going and we felt like it was the right thing to do, first and foremost for our players and staff, not to create unnecessary exposure to them and also as a global citizen here.
"You're hearing a lot about flattening the curve now. That wasn't the way it was being discussed even just a week ago. But those were things we were considering the two-ish weeks ago when we were faced with this decision. It felt like the right thing to do and it also felt like what's most important for our staff and our partners is actually to create certainty. We'd rather err on the side of caution and perhaps cancel too early than trying to keep something going for too much longer that we just didn't feel comfortable with."
On Monday, the ESL Pro League kicked off, with teams at home in Europe and broadcasters in a studio in Cologne, Germany, with a skeleton crew running the ship as other non-broadcast staffers worked from home. They added webcams for certain games, attempting to connect players with fans as they would in an offline environment. But at the core, what will matter most is whether the competition will remain as competitive.
Thankfully, both ESL and Flashpoint have appropriate partners for online leagues. ESL acquired Counter-Strike matchmaking platform ESEA in November 2015. FACEIT, the largest competitor to ESEA, is a partner in the Flashpoint project. Both systems have competitive integrity guidelines, and ESEA famously has a top-of-the-line anti-cheat platform. Both leagues though will have to be creative on the broadcast side to make things work.
"There is the risk of competitive integrity issues and people being bad actors in whichever way they can be," Wakeford said about Flashpoint. "That's going to be hard to police. We don't want to put extra bodies in environments where these players are. While we could solve the hardware issues, we could solve the connectivity issues, I don't think we could solve the bad actor issues. Knowing the players around the table, we see that as a smaller issue than just making sure they're all set up and have the ability to play when the games begin."
This isn't new for ESL. The first handful of ESL Pro League seasons were run completely online, to the dissatisfaction of fans who hunger for offline, "better" competition. Online competition will have to do, because in a world where no traditional professional sports leagues are operating, esports can and likely will lead the way in competitive entertainment.
Flashpoint will have to move swiftly. The league put a lot of eggs in the basket of its content being in-person. Aside from audio issues, its first weekend went well in that regard. The content did look good and it made the most of having some of the best talent in Counter-Strike on its air. Those same opportunities won't be available in the online-only world.
For Wakeford, he hopes for the best, both in the short term of making a presentable product using the internet and the long term of the virus abating and a return to normalcy eventually coming. His business, Gen.G, is one of esports' few multinational corporations, spanning the United States, South Korea and China. He has seen significant improvement in China, he said, with some workers returning to their offices, but South Korea -- which he views as a month behind China in recovering from the pandemic -- is still working its way back. The U.S., he said, is even further behind, in his opinion.
What both Wakeford and Levine could agree on is that, ultimately, in a world with no traditional sports and many people quarantined at home or out of work, they expect an uptick in engagement for their products and esports as a whole. Wakeford said he saw that in China as it underwent significant quarantines the past few months.
"As we come out of this, you're going to see a continued uptick in engagement, viewership around esports, around streaming," he said. "People spending time in the communities that they enjoy, and I would say that if you look at various trend lines that we see coming out, that's one of them."
The big fish at the end of the tunnel, for now, is ESL One Rio, the next Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major, scheduled for May in Brazil. But as the coronavirus continues to spread, that event's chances of happening look slim.
"There's nothing formal set that we can speak to at this point, other than I don't want to sound like a cliché broken record, genuinely and sincerely, the safety of our players and staff and fans are first and foremost," Levine said. "We're working with [Valve] to see what the best course of action is for that Major in May. I think that certainty is important, and the community is hungry, but we're running that out in a diligent way with them. Being very in tune with the local climate and things that are happening."