Carmac: "CS:GO not viable for IEM"

ESL chief Michal "Carmac" Blicharz has explained why it is unlikely that CS:GO will be played at Intel Extreme Masters events.

In recent months, CS:GO has witnessed an exponential growth, both in terms of the number of players and in the prize money that is up for grabs in tournaments worldwide.

During EMS One Katowice, CS:GO reached over 167 thousand concurrent players, a new record, making it the second most-played game on Steam, according to an article at PCGamer.com.

Still, we are a long way from seeing Counter-Strike back on the IEM stage, claims Michal "Carmac" Blicharz, who explained that CS:GO still does not fit the concept of a global event.

"CS:GO is one of the major games in esports, once again, which is really fantastic, but it is not a good fit for Southeast Asia or china, for example," he told ongamers.com.

"That takes away a little bit of opportunity for us to use it in IEM to the fullest.

"IEM is also logistically limited, we only have one stage, so we cannot have multiple games being played.

"Therefore, due to logistical and geographical factors, we created ESL One for games like Dota 2 and CS:GO."

You can watch Blicharz's complete video interview with ongamers.com by going here.