Valve: No plans for CS:GO International despite Dota’s success

Valve has reiterated their decision not to host a single world championship for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive despite the success of last week’s Dota 2 finals.

The International 5 concluded at the weekend, reaching a massive audience with several million watching across five official language streams, with American team Evil Geniuses taking the $6.6m first place.

However Valve’s Erik Johnson is not convinced that the company will look to replicate the tournament with one of their other eSports franchises, CS:GO.

"We’re pretty comfortable with different projects taking different approaches to solve similar problems," Johnson told IGN. "As a company we actually learn more when we do that. If we all point everything in the same direction, we’d have a real blind spot for when we’re screwing up. In some ways, you want to diversify a bunch of decisions across different projects because you zero in on the right answer quickly, as opposed to ‘we have this thing that’s working, everybody do that right now."

To Johnson and Valve’s credit, CS:GO viewership does not suffer from the approach, as ESL and ESEA’s premiership tournaments regularly pull in multi-million audience numbers throughout the year.

Johnson also suggested the possibility of CS:GO making the leap to Source 2 as Dota is currently in the process of being ported to the engine.