Thread by @tomi

1/ THREAD: I believe the increasing length of matches is becoming a problem in Counter-Strike.

Maps used to run at most 40-45 minutes with BO3 series often finishing in ~2h30. Now +4 hours long series are common, as we’ve recently seen with matches running late into the night.

2/ Various fundamental rule changes have led to a gradual increase in match length in the past years. There include increases in:

- freezetime
- roundtime
- bomb timer
- timeouts
- half-time break

While each alone is relatively minor, cumulatively the impact is meaningful.

3/ In addition, the modern economy in CS:GO appears to make matches more drawn out – teams don’t tend to get blown out because there are fewer save rounds, leading to an increase in rounds played per map on average, compounding the impact of each individual change outlined above.

4/ Finally, the ever-changing map pool (with 7 maps in total) to keep the game fresh (a clear net-positive overall) has seemingly made 2-0 results less common. More and more series go the distance, further compounding the growth in the increase in average round/map length.

5/ Why is match length so important?

It’s harder to carve out +3 hours for a match than it is to find 1-2 hours to commit to one and it’s less interesting to watch if you know that you cannot finish the entire match, meaning fewer people are likely to tune in in the first place.

6/ The longer a match, the harder it is for anyone, but particularly a young professional or someone with kids (or, those who grew up playing CS:GO but no longer play) to commit to watching it in full.

They may still tune in for parts, but the experience is not comparable.

7/ If you cannot watch an entire match and its broadcast, you may lack context for the match, or not know the storylines that make it meaningful. As a result, you may find the content less engaging overall.

If that goes on for longer, how long will you continue tuning in at all?

8/ One of the core theses for esports growth is how underrepresented older age groups are among fans. As a result, if those older age groups (today in 20s and 30s) remain engaged as they age, the audience will grow significantly for decades simply through expansion of age groups.

9/ That is not to say the whole experience should be optimized for that specific audience segment, but it helps illustrate the potential issue.

More importantly, the issue applies to EVERYONE from students to active CS:GO players to Bill Gates – everyone’s time is scarce.

10/ But CS:GO viewership continues growing, so how do we there is an issue in the first place?

It’s possible a problem doesn’t exist (at least yet), and a case could be made the incremental hours are net-positive if total hours watched is a key metric being sold to advertisers…

11/ …but it’s also possible AMA is a lagging indicator.

Consumer behavior is slow to change, so long-time fans may continue to keep matches on while partially watching but multitasking (with length ruling out focusing fully on a match), until they stop tuning in altogether.

12/ Meanwhile, for as long as there are new players in CS:GO (which hit new record recently during COVID-19) and some % of those convert into CS:GO esports fans, it could be that viewership is growing IN SPITE of the match length increase.

But that may not tell the whole story.

13/ If fewer fans stay engaged throughout an entire match, it’s likely they will churn out faster, effectively decreasing each viewer’s LTV.

If (or when) we get to a point where churn offsets gross new viewers, viewership will start declining, and people will sound the alarms.

14/ However, by the time viewers are churning out en masse, it will be tricky to find a solution.

It’s significantly harder to re-engage users than it is to retain them in the first place. That’s why focus on retention is paramount before net growth slows down, or turns negative

15/ To make matters worse, the CS:GO calendar has long been oversaturated, which decreases the importance and value of any individual event.

If there were fewer events, it would be easier to dedicate a day here and there to watch, but ~no one can do it on a weekly basis.

16/ Notably both length/saturation are common issues in traditional sports (which are far ahead of esports in life cycle and don’t have the tailwind of user growth helping them).

Regular seasons are drawn out and uninteresting (too many games) and matches last too long.

17/ So how would one go about solving this before it becomes a real issue?

There are almost certainly many ways of improving the situation without significant downsides. Responses to @gla1ve_csgo included many suggestions already

https://twitter.com/gla1ve_csgo/status/1260806701697175555

18/ For example, we could try MR12 (the change to MR15 was made to decrease importance of pistol rounds in the 1.6 economy, far removed from today’s system), or potentially lowering round time as well as duration of smokes/molotovs (though that would also impact rotations, etc.)

19/ More radical suggestions have included e.g., playing out more matches in BO1 while potentially increasing maxrounds per map, or trying CO-format, where only terrorist rounds count but each half has a strict timelimit that makes match length predictable and eases scheduling.

20/ Any of these suggestions could have a meaningful impact and many good ideas have yet to surface.

I haven’t given this enough thought to have a firm view on what the ideal solution is, but I’m 100% convinced change is needed and it’s better to act too early than too late.

Addemdum: I don't think shortening matches would necessarily lead to fewer total hours watched.

If matches were shorter, you could switch to tournaemnt formats with more matches, and individual matches would likely peak higher given viewers would focus attention all at once.