...To the desk of Mike Long

I recently read up on Liam Crowley’s article debating the CGS’ choice in picking Counter Strike: Source for the primary FPS title in the 2008 season. I have to say, even after a brief read, followed by a full analyzation of Liam’s piece, I completely agree with the points put across over on GotFrag… but where have we gone wrong with Call of Duty 4?

There are a lot of ups and downs about the game to put it bluntly, but the overall success of the '2007 Game of the Year' has been overwhelming, even to our very own Call of Duty community, and has been largely credited over the past few months. But no matter what, there are still people in the eSports world who seem to think that the Counter Strike series hold the reigns dominantly over the Call of Duty series, in both gameplay and community.

I’m no expert in the Counter Strike department, but since November last year, whilst the regular players of Counter Strike 1.6 and Source all logged onto their Steam accounts to play the game they’ve been playing for so long now, Call of Duty 4 has been labouring its way through the market, selling over seven million copies to date, making it one of the best FPS titles to hit stores for a long while. This may seem like it doesn’t count for much when taking the experience online, but it really does, proven by the large community that backs the name of Call of Duty.

The CGS might be thinking, "Call of Duty 4 has sold over seven million copies so far, and has a large community behind it, so what?" Well, putting aside these few things mentioned so far, I move onto my next point... support.

I have been into the gaming scene for a long time now, and never before have I seen a game being supported so much by its publishers and developers. Activision and Infinity Ward have given Call of Duty 4 and its community so much in the space of four months. Already, we have seen Infinity Ward’s technical team delve into interest, releasing five patches to date. Some of you may think they are useless, but every little helps.

3,000€ in prize money was donated by Activision to the first ever Call of Duty 4 LAN event last November, i32, with a further 3,000€ being put into another LAN event the following week. And even more recently, a staggering 6,000€ was added by Activision to the prize pot for the i33 Call of Duty 4 tournament, tolling a huge sum of 12,000€ overall. What has Source put out? 10,000€, quite a big amount, but Call of Duty 4 still remains the big game of i33, which has attracted many more foreign teams than usual to attend.

Yes, we’ve had five patches and lots of money injected into Call of Duty 4 so far, but one big thing still remains, which Counter Strike holds the key to… in-game TV. CoDTV has been the biggest discussion to date, since the release of Call of Duty 4, and in a recent interview with Robert Bowling - a member of staff at Infinity Ward – he confirmed that the team behind the game have been discussing it too, making it a possibility for the future. How great would that be? The already spectator-friendly Call of Duty 4, improving its roots with CoDTV, but as we all still wish for this feature to be added, Infinity Ward haven’t filled our stockings yet, bringing me back to my original question – where have we gone wrong with Call of Duty 4?

I can’t really say that the absence of CoDTV is the turning point for the CGS in their choice to pick Counter Strike: Source as their primary FPS title, but we could definitely use it and it would improve the games status in the eSports world. Once of the reasons could be our start to the games ‘birth’ as we can call it. Since the release of the PAM4 mod, the community as a whole haven’t all been happy with the same mode to play in, with several other versions of match mods taking effect, such as PAMD and DAM. And although the debate has gone quieter recently, there are still players who disagree with what the majority prefer to play with, and we need to resolve this fast if we want to carry on our climb up the competitive eSports ladder.

Another thing – which we cannot help as a community – is the impressions other gaming communities have of the Call of Duty community. Let’s be honest, we haven’t had the most attention as a game or community since our early days back in 2003, which unfortunately still effects us today. People outside the Call of Duty community think of us as ‘small timers’, and although we are bringing in a decent amount of attention from other games (as a fair amount of teams switch over to Call of Duty 4), we still have a long way to go if we want to make it big in the eSports industry.

I agree with Liam on all points he made in his article on GotFrag, and as he already stated, the prospect of Source getting the boot from the CGS is unlikely, but we still need to carry on our fight for justice in the eSports world, as some of you may express it. It’s time for a change… change which will finally drop the Counter Strike name from big competitions and introduce something new and fresh, such as Call of Duty. We won the battle for WSVG, so we can either be a success in eSports altogether or die trying - well, not really.

Who knows? Call of Duty may be at the top of the menu on the GotFrag web site someday.

Original Article by Liam Crowley