Championship Gaming Series

~ the eulogy ~

The Championship Gaming Series was locked to a carrier. You needed a DirecTV subscription to see it in America and STAR TV to see it across Asia, and Turkey in 2007 had neither of those things. Counter-Strike over here lived in internet cafes and on forum threads: the same game, a completely different economy around it. I was twenty-three the year this league held its first draft and I did not learn it had existed until long after it was over.

DirecTV announced it at CES on 8 January 2007 with more than fifty million dollars of News Corporation money behind it, run by David Hill, who had been president of Fox Sports. The pitch was not a tournament. It was a league, with franchises named after cities and players signed to real salaried contracts. The season was shot for television.

The first draft was held on 12 June 2007 at the Playboy Mansion in Bel Air, and the first name called in the first professional gaming draft ever staged was Vanessa Arteaga. Drafted players got thirty thousand dollars as a starting salary for a filming block of about two months, against a prize pool of five million in the opening year. Season one began on 9 July 2007.

~ the dossier ~

~ the format ~

Six North American franchises carried city names, from New York down to Carolina, and each roster covered the same four titles: Counter-Strike: Source, Dead or Alive 4, FIFA and a racing game. That structure was borrowed wholesale from American sports television, down to the snake draft order and the two-month season. It is the part the modern industry eventually arrived at anyway, roughly seven years later and without the satellite dish.

The numbers tell you what went wrong before anyone said it out loud. Season one reportedly reached fifty million viewers, and about ninety percent of them watched on STAR TV in Asia. DirecTV's own domestic figure for the second season was two million. The league had found an audience on the wrong continent to sell against, and its costs were denominated in American television production.

~ how it actually ended ~

Season two went the other way from caution. The league expanded to eighteen teams across twelve countries, adding franchises in Europe and Mexico, which meant more travel and more production for an operation that had not yet shown a path to breaking even. It finished that season in September 2008. Lehman Brothers had collapsed the same month.

On 18 November 2008 DirecTV closed it. The statement said profitability was too far in the future to sustain operations in the interim, which is corporate for the economics never worked and the recession removed the patience. Players who had signed actual employment contracts to play video games found out that the job category could be deleted as easily as it had been invented.

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