PGL CEO: "To disrupt the monopoly you need events with different levels of production"

Sliviu Stroie founded PGL in 2002 and has been the man running the operations for the Bucharest-based company ever since. During a downtime at the Minor last week, we sat down in his office, a room labeled as "5 - BIG BOSS", for a long and in-depth interview regarding the CS:GO scene.

PGL's CEO, Silviu Stroie

After getting his thoughts on the current Minor system and what can be improved, the conversation touched on the financial struggles of tournament organizers and the different approaches Valve has for DOTA and CS:GO. Silviu Stroie also announced that PGL will be heavily expanding to North America and Asia, ending the interview with some of his personal wishes regarding CS:GO.

You have now hosted four European Minors here in Bucharest, where you also hosted the CIS Minor last week. Besides that, you have also run Asia Minors in the past. You've been labeled a bit as "the Minor company" since you've been doing almost all of them. What are your thoughts on holding the Minors and what you have done with them so far?

We wanted to get involved with the Minors because it was basically our only chance to be a part of the CS:GO scene. I mean, if you remember, in 2015, which, for me, was the last big and great year for a proper CS:GO scene, there were almost weekly LAN events, all around the world, done by different organizers. We used to have 10-15 different companies running proper tournaments. I mean, ESWC was a proper CS:GO event, and there were also others like fragbite and Gfinity, so a lot of tournament organizers.

Starting 2016, a lot of things changed when ESL created WESA and got a lot of teams under their hood. Since then, everything has been slowly changing, and a lot of organizers have either completely ceased operations or dropped out of CS:GO. We saw the opportunity to run CS:GO Minors as one way to still do CS:GO events so that, at one point, we could have a real chance to actually get a Major, which we ended up hosting in Krakow —so my whole though process was right.

For this Minor, you are working with ELEAGUE but also working with Valve as they are overseeing the whole project. How does it work in terms of decision making, what do you get to decide when running this Minor, for example? How much is it you making the decisions, how much do you have to follow the guidelines?

Basically, ELEAGUE hired us to run the CIS and European Minor in our studio, in Bucharest, and we are working very closely with ELEAGUE. Most of the things are decided by us, like the format of the competition, which is similar to the one we used before. I think this is a proper format for a Minor, a four-day event with group stages and all the elimination matches being BO3. Overall, it's our decision... Well, to be 100% correct, we are in charge of all operations once the eight teams are selected and they are coming to play the Minors. This time, we were not involved in the qualifying process for the Minor, that was not us at all.

PGL have been involved with the Minors since they were added to the Major cycle in 2016

Recently, on Twitter, there was a lot of talk about the qualifying process and getting the teams here. You had some ideas of your own, other people as well. What do you think can be changed, what would be the ideal for a Minor system and what do you think can realistically be achieved?

I think that there needs to be a major change to the Minors. Right now, from an organizer point of view, the biggest issue with the Minors is that they are a complete loss for the organizers. Basically, very few companies, if any at all, are interested in actually financially supporting any kind of Minor event, doesn't matter if it is the Europe Minor, the Asia Minor or any other. And the viewership is quite low. Right now, we are at a planning stage to see if we can come up with some creative ideas that we can propose to Valve and see how we can change the Minor system in the future.

One big issue, which was particularly felt in the last qualifier, is the online stage. I don't have a solution for it yet, but it needs to be changed somehow. If for example, the whole CS:GO was in 2015 with a lot of LAN events, every weekend in different parts of the world, for tier 1 teams, tier 2 and so on, then we could maybe build a point system for the teams attending the LAN events and, based on this point system and the region, we could maybe be able to remove the online qualifier for Minors and invite those teams directly to the Minor event. Since that doesn't exist anymore, it would be very crazy to rely on just one company who is running almost all of the CS:GO tournaments right now. That would be biased, it can't be right. The whole point system would need to be based on multiple tournament organizers running different LAN events.

The next Major is going to take place in September, there is not enough time to actually build this kind of a system, so we need to come up with a hybrid proposal. We are still planning it right now. Ideally, from a tournament organizer point of view, we would need to be able to attract more sponsors [to Minors] in order to make them financially viable. I would, maybe, increase the number of teams playing at the Minors, maybe make the Minor event a week long, hoping to attract a bigger viewership and to get better support from various partners. I mean, historically speaking, everybody who has ever been involved in the Minor system has seen that, at the end of each event, they represent a total loss.

PGL has worked with Valve closely in both Dota and CS:GO. As we all know, Valve does not have the same approach for both games, and their current plan for the international qualifiers is something similar to what you seem to propose for CS:GO. What do you see as the biggest differences in their approach to the two games? 

I think that they have two different approaches, and, frankly, I think that they are right to do it because, at the end of the day, they have to learn and understand what esport strategy works better for future products and for the years to come. I don't think that the right approach is to have the same strategy for both games or even to expand it to other games from other publishers.

I think that the Dota 2 ecosystem, as it's built right now, it's still in an early stage. We are going to have more real data after a complete year. Again, I'm not sure how something like that can be built in CS:GO overnight. Right now, I do not think there is a way for the CS:GO system to go back to what it used to be in 2015. Right now, there is only one massive player running around 80% of the CS:GO year calendar, to put it simple, there is no way around it. The only thing that can actually disrupt the monopoly idea is to actually run different events with different levels of production like we did in Krakow, so we can show the world that there is also somebody else out there.

Coming back to your question, we work with Valve both in CS:GO and Dota like everyone else on the market, we are not a special company for them. We just always deliver very good quality, and they seem to like it since they are working with us for other events as well.

You mentioned the Krakow Major, I wanted to shortly get your thoughts on how it all went. It was your first independent CS:GO Major, after all...

Well, we put our resources together, everything that we had and didn't have, just to make sure that we ran the best Major ever... And we achieved our intentions to some degree. I mean, in terms of production quality this was by far the best CS:GO Major ever, and I'm not sure if another Major will ever be able to get close to this. But, unfortunately, we had way too many technical issues, either with computers, the internet or the game itself. I'd say we focused 100% on getting a perfect production, and I think we didn't put the same efforts into having a proper admin team, and a large enough one, to run the event. But we survived and we have to learn from our mistakes, and, right now, we have a completely new process in-house, allowing us, in a couple of months, to have a very large admin team dealing with CS:GO, how it needs to be set up and what the proper settings for the game to run as best as possible are, and able to fix any sort of computer issues really fast.

Several people have asked me about this, and I think the Krakow Major was very good in terms of production quality, in terms of the audience, there had never been a Major with such an audience and such amazing people. Personally, this was our first fully event in Poland, and I really think that Poland is by far the best country in Europe to run any kind of esport events, better than Sweden or Germany or Romania. For sure we will go back there and try to do as many things as possible. I'm deeply, deeply sorry for all the technical issues that we faced in the tournament. We have learned our lessons and we will fix everything in the near future, so that something like this won't happen again.

Stroie thinks that Poland is the best country in Europe to run esports events in

As we all know, a lot of companies try to get a Major through the pitching process, do you think that the problems you had at the Krakow one will impact your chances to get another one in the future negatively?

If I were Valve, of course I would have to question every single piece of the whole process, and that is why we are doing a lot of internal changes about how we run the tournament as a whole, to make sure we address everything that went wrong in Krakow. In the end, Valve is going to decide which company is the best fit for this kind of an event. I don't know, we will see in some weeks who wins the rights to run the next CS:GO Major.

Of course, we are pitching for it, but, again, all I want is that the best product wins. And by best product, I mean... That's why I miss 2015 so much, because, since the start of 2016, we have seen a dominant company monopolizing CS:GO with a very mediocre, at best, CS:GO product. So once you own the teams and you are able to finance all this crazy spending, even at a huge loss, then what the viewers and the actual player get, in the end, is a very, very, mediocre product. There is nothing new, nothing innovative. Like we say inside the company: just take the game feed, put it on stream and that's all. And we will never, ever do something like that.

You mentioned a lot of things changing in the last two years. At the Major you had a lot of problems with the players themselves, and, as you said, there is that connection between the teams/players and the tournament organizers. How do you see the change in terms of dealing with the players, their requests at events, do you think that maybe some of them have gone overboard and demanded things that at not realistic? Have the demands gone too high?

No, I have never felt something like this. In the end, the whole event is made by the players, for the players. We have to deal with whatever demands they have as quickly as possible.

The only thing that I deeply regret, and we won't allow something like this to happen in the future, is that there were several players who were ranting on Twitter rather than addressing the issue directly with us, which is not professional. How can we solve an issue if we don't know about it, if the player himself doesn't say anything? Twitter allows you just a specific number of words, and some of the players didn't describe the situations very accurately. So it's way better if it's done directly.

Between the group stage and the main event, I had a talk with all the teams involved, and I told them again: "Whatever issues you have, just come to us and we are going to fix them". And there are two good examples I can give with two teams who are exemplary in their actions: Virtus.pro and Astralis. They are 100% professional and they care about their game and the conditions, and they really wanted to talk to us  to make sure we could fix these things.

Going back to your question, this is another area in our company where we are going to increase our staff. How we are going to deal with the players directly, how we are going to manage all of their expectations... I mean, they are coming to a Major, and their expectations are very, very high, they demand the best, and we have to give them the best.

PGL are going to expand to North America and Asia and will build two new studios

Let's move towards the future plans for PGL. You were rumored to be cooperating with PEA, who ended not doing what they were supposed to. But they are still around and still doing stuff, a few months ago Misfits dignitas joined them. Is that still something you are still involved in, a long-term league or something of that form, still something you plan to do? Or is there anything you have in your plans?

From my knowledge, we are one of the very, very last independent companies. Pretty much almost everybody else, except maybe one or two other companies, have either been acquired or received financial investment from investment funds, and that's why, for a lot of people and companies, including PEA, it's very simple and easy to work with us, since we are not related to an investment fund, we are not tied to another esport company, we don't own teams. We don't own players, we are completely independent, so it's very, very easy for anybody to work with us.

With PEA, during, I think, the summer of 2016, they ran a pitch to select a partner. We won that pitch, but, unfortunately, they were never able to go forward with their plans, and it stopped. But, mentioning future plans, one thing that I'm sure and that very few people know is that right now, we are the second largest esports company in terms of revenue, and that is for the second year in a row, 2016 and 2017.  There is only one bigger esport company in terms of revenue, and that is ESL.

Our plans for 2018 and ahead is to expand heavily into Asia and North America, and to start a lot of events and operations there. Our goal for the next five years is very clear: to become the biggest independent, or neutral, esport company. I mean, we are not in the same league as, for example, MLG, who are now owned by Activision Blizzard, so I am not considering them. But we can compete with everybody else, like ESL and DreamHack, FACEIT, EPICENTER, and so on.

Spreading out to North America and Asia, does that also involve you building a studio there, some facilities?

Yes, starting in 2018, we are going to build offices, including studios, in these two regions, to be able to run more events on a global scale. We have a lot of partners who are coming to us continuously with requests to be able to operate a specific product, for a specific game, in multiple continents.

Before we end this interview, is there anything you wish to add?

The only thing I want to add is, like I said, I really miss 2015, the period when there were a lot of tournament organizers out there. Going forward, the number of tournament organizers is going to decrease even more, we are going to see even more mergers, acquisitions, and several companies go bankrupt. A lot of the companies in esports right now aren't making money, including the industry leader. For years they have been operating at heavy losses, and they keep finding investors after investors, trying to build a monopoly in several games and failing to do that.

PGL will continue raising the bar in terms of production

I'm not sure how many people in the CS:GO scene can remember, but in CS 1.6 there were a couple of amazing matchmaking platforms, like Gather Network and Playzeek. I would really like for all those features from those platforms to be completely built into the game client. I really want to be able to start my own server, anywhere I want, play with whoever I want and be able to do pretty much anything in the game. I'm not sure how simple or hard it is for Valve to build something like this in the game, but it's something I really, really miss from the 1.6 era.

Another big wish for me would be to implement a tournament option directly in the game client, allowing companies like ours to run their tournament directly in the client, without having to install a third-party client or go to a webpage... It would be much simpler for it to be completely integrated into the game.

On top of all this, of course, a better anti-cheat. Counter-Strike is the game I have basically played my whole life, I really care a lot about it and I'm also getting frustrated when sometimes I think that somebody is cheating in the game. I don't know, some time ago I was selected to be a part of the Overwatch team in the game, and that makes me really happy because there is a way I can give my opinion about a specific player, and it's even better when several weeks after I have submitted my report I get the notice in the game that the player I suspected of cheating was actually a cheater.

So this is pretty much it, and I really hope all the other organizers in the industry would stop focusing on making money for their investors and would build bigger and better events, with the players and the viewers in mind. That's what I really hope will happen in the future.