It was a three months relationship,
GamePlay's Counter-Strike team will be celebrating the New Year homeless as their contracts with the Russian company will not be renewed in January. The financial crisis is pointed as the plot for this situation, which one is not that unexpected as the team already had to cancel their attendance to Dreamhack Winter 2008 due to lack of funds.
Team manager Shayan "Shayan" Taleb explains the current situation of the Russian economy, due to the world economic crisis we are going through, is not healthy and GamePlay is one of the many companies being affected by it. In his mind, this is just the start of a downspiral for electronic sports as we are just starting to feel the impact.
A few days ago the same reason was pointed for Nvidia's decision to stop sponsoring the Electronic Sports World Cup in a world wide scale, yet keeping a close relationship with the event as Dallon explains, "NVIDIA will choose locally to support, or not, some ESWC preliminaries. We are also actually discussing of their support of the next ESWC Grand Final that will be organized end of June in Paris".
Back to GamePlay issue, it's still uncertain if the team will stick together while trying to find a new home. Speculation start to rise around Roccat's possibility to welcome back their former Counter-Strike team, even though the organisation seems to have taken a different direction.
The following five will be clanless from January 1st on.
Oskari "ruuit" Aspe
Juuso "contE" Sajakoski
Niko "naSu" Kovanen
Samu "plastE" Aalto
Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen
Related www.gotfrag.com (source)
but lurppis is amazing