Ever since ESL striking a deal with Facebook a year ago giving them exclusive streaming rights for certain CSGO and DOTA 2 tournaments, it has been met with widespread disdain from the respective communities, and finally it seems like Valve is unhappy as well.
Laggy streams, sound and quality issues, and just a general hatred towards streaming on Facebook rather than Twitch or YouTube saw a pitfall in the viewership.
Esports journalist Rod ‘Slasher’ Breslau tweeted “That marks the end of the final ESL CSGO or Dota stream on Facebook in 2018,” following the ESL Pro League S8 Finals on December 9.”
“Really poor viewership all year and Facebook hasn’t proven it can do streaming, to the detriment to both esports. Valve not happy. ESL neither even with $. Correction: Deal runs through end of 2019.”
To put this in perspective, ESL Pro League games saw a huge drop off with regular season games getting only about 10k viewers compared to the 60000+ viewers for the previous season on Twitch, while the finals, which saw home team Astralis fight for an extra million dollars, saw a mere 30 thousand views, which was minuscule compared to the 1 million viewers achieved by the ELEAGUE Major in 2017.
While the deal with Facebook for DOTA is now over and is likely to be discontinued, CSGO fans will have to wait for at least another year till the deal expires at the end of 2019.
