Two weeks after a report unearthed ESL’s plans to introduce strict exclusivity rules for its CS:GO league, Valve has responded, albeit without directly mentioning ESL.
Valve posted an update on the CS:GO blog titled “Keeping Things Competitive,” which discussed exclusivity, in addition to conflicts of interest and media rights. In the post, Valve said while it is receptive to tournament organizers experimenting, it is not interested in “providing licenses for events that restrict participating teams from attending other events.”
Valve said this is because “exclusivity prevents other events from keeping the CSGO ecosystem functioning if an individual event fails.”
Conflicts of interest were also discussed in the blog post.
“We consider a conflict of interest to be any case where a tournament, team, or player has a financial relationship with any other participating team or its players,” Valve said.
Valve even touched on media rights, which turned out to be a big issue during the last major when StarLadder filed DMCA takedowns on streams that were broadcasting the tournament. Valve seemed to side with StarLadder, although it said tournament organizers should be as “inclusive as possible.”
Correction Sept. 18 9:52pm CT: In an earlier version of this article, we incorrectly said RFRSH owns Astralis. RFRSH sold Astralis, along with Origen, in July.
