R.I.P GotFrag
The best esports coverage website in the US has announced its closure. As one of its European alumni I'd like to pay tribute to everything it gave us.
It’s not really the done thing in e-sports to lament the passing of someone that was at one time competition. It means you have won and winning in e-sports seems to be about stomping to death anyone and everyone that wants to share the space you occupy. So when a company goes bust, an organisation folds or a website goes under, the done thing is to punch the air in triumph and talk about yourself some more. This is the e-sports way – we don’t share, we don’t play nice and we absolutely never give credit where it’s due just in case that leads someone to think that someone else might be better than you… Won’t someone please think of the traffic.
Even if I was cut from the same cloth as those that attempt to unofficially govern e-sports, I doubt that I could still resist getting a bit misty eyed at what happens when you type GotFrag into your search bar these days. No longer am I taken to the blue, silver and white, the banner of shadowy figures and the front page telling me World of Warcraft news from two years ago… Now it is simply a black screen, with the “G” logo, words saying “coming back soon” for a few fleeting seconds before being dumped on MLG’s doorstep.
Even though I hadn’t checked that site for years because, ultimately, it wasn’t worth looking at any more, it’s sad to know that it is finally gone. What will happen to all that content I don’t know but I suspect it will disappear into the same black hole all the work for CGS did, generations of e-sports enthusiasts denied the closest thing we have to a definitive history of the early climb to the top, pre-streaming, pre-mainstream, pre-free-to-play…
I’m particularly saddened because I played a small part in their history, involved with it only by chance and unfortunate circumstances. Indeed, if everyone in e-sports was all about the bigger picture I’d have never have been involved with them at all. After my first true love, Source Junky, died after the owner disappeared round Europe leaving a trail of empties and Czech hookers in his wake, the logical step was Cadred. We’d fought a bitter war for years and I’d carried the fight more bitterly than most. I didn’t feel like we got the credit we deserved and we were all older, wiser, better than those kids playing editors. It was with a heavy heart that I surrendered, like the Japanese who refused to do so long after World War 2, and those kids became my new bosses. Hell, I did it for e-sports…
Then CGS came knocking and due to their affiliation with Cadred I was propelled into a land of exorbitant pay, television work and an illusion that e-sports had arrived. With it came the usual array of petty corruption, lies and back-stabbing that is present whenever there is money. And while most involved got rich and secured fantastic careers at the top of the e-sports food chain regardless of their talents, my commitment to two very important things – wanting to write the truth about e-sports and drunken nudity – ultimately colluded to see me out in the cold.
No problem, I thought, Cadred will take me back. However, so much had I upset the delicate sensibilities of Scott Valencia that he had issued a threat to all the sites that they had contact with – if Richard Lewis works for you, we won’t work with you. As such, the official coverage partners couldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole. Neither could the franchises of compLexity and Carolina Core who had also been interested in securing my services.
At this time I thought to myself “fuck it”. I still had a sweet job at Omega Sektor (and what were the odds of that going bust) and to be honest the whole e-sports writing thing was stale. Too many people playing at politics and diplomacy, like Game of Thrones for nerds and losers. All I had ever wanted to do was write about the stuff that everyone knew but no-one ever said. There were no journalists in e-sports, only PR people.
Then GotFrag came calling. They had openly clashed with CGS on a few fronts and didn’t really care about their policies of shutting out those who didn’t work with them. Amidst the desperate clamour for crumbs from the CGS table, GotFrag were happy to stand alone, safe in the knowledge that they didn’t really need them as much as CGS needed their credibility. They even said that the fact it would piss them off was an added bonus. I was sold immediately.
The slight problem, of course, was that it was a North American site and as such, they didn’t really give a fuck about anything in Europe. Still, they wanted to try and get into that market and I called on a few of the old Source Junky guys to come and pitch in. I still maintain that the work I did there was among my best and it was definitely the start of taking this all seriously. It was there I was allowed to run with my own ideas, doing the first ever “Good LAN / Bad LAN” that would later go on to become a millstone round my neck. They were happy for me to write exposés about the crooks in e-sports. They sent me to events and asked only that I came back with something, not that I sat hunched over a PC inputting scores and coding brackets.
Eventually we won a few of the Americans over. They took an active interest in the work at least, if not the scene and it was eventually touted that my work would be used for GotFrag Prime, their pay per view articles service. I wasn’t really into that. Good journalism should be free in my opinion. However, the fact that they were so committed to the written word in a time when everyone was starting to make the switch to video, that they produced written pieces that they knew their audience wanted and appreciated at a time when it would have been easier to appeal to the lowest common denominator… It was something that stayed with me.
The relationship ended, as most do, over money. There were rumours circulating by this point that the site was in trouble financially. I looked around at people that had big names but were dry humping the site even as it lay dying and thought “surely there’s a better way”. The smaller name lost out to the bigger names. Again.
There’s a lot of myths about GotFrag. It is perhaps a good thing that there is no archive around so people can see the evidence for themselves. For example, it was always held up as being a proponent of the very best e-sports journalism, which wasn’t true until well into its regime. It did better work in its decline than it probably ever did in its prime. And while the staff associated with its success might well read like a “whos who” of e-sports, many of them took fat pay-cheques and like the leeches they were sucked it dry until it became the husk that most of you will remember it for being.
When it was at its best though it actually did champion genuine e-sports journalism in a way that few sites did at the time and, depressingly, few do now. It was the place to go for alternative, irreverent, writing. It was a place where big names put their opinions on paper and never shied away from throwing barbs at the sacred cows of the e-sports industry. It was the first website to truly bridge the gap between the community and the pros and the first that realised the two were not so different, the same mindset separated only by skill.
Sad then that now people only want to be associated with its successes, not its failures. On the Twittersphere you’ll find plenty of people happy to slap their backs so hard their dislocate their shoulders – “I WAS GOTFRAG” – but few can explain where it all went wrong and even fewer place themselves as being there when it did.
There was a brief glimmer of hope when MLG acquired the website. In truth it was too late to pull it out of the nosedive and I’m not sure that they ever really knew what they had. The name will always strike a chord with those who remember it for what it was but, even though I expect to see the brand resurrected at some point, it won’t ever be the same. My friendly and respectful advice to MLG would be not to let it return. No-one wants to see old heavyweights wheeled out for one more fight. Just go watch Muhammed Ali versus Larry Holmes.
The legacy of the website will be twofold. First, of course, what it championed and stood for at a time when snatching traffic and making money seemed to be the twin priorities of those still standing. Second is the generation of writers it launched, not just those who actually wrote for GotFrag and got to feel what it was like to be part of something big, but those who never got to appear on its virtual pages but aspired to do so. Many of them are still around now and I’d wager all would talk about how important GotFrag was in their development.
People will romanticise what they did and a lot of it will be vague truths warped through nostalgia’s prism. The bar has long since been raised but they were the first ones to set it and that is always important. I know I still carry a lot of what I learned in my time and their values were what I brought to Cadred long after outlasting the kids, the CGS and Mr. Valencia. We may have been rivals of sorts and we may even have won the battle, simply by outlasting them. We were always more alike than we’d have cared to let on and a little bit of GotFrag will always remain folded into the fabric of this website.