Worst Esports Promotion Of 2024

When it all comes down to it the "Play Like S1mple" Project was embarrassing not just for the player whose name was attached to it.

Previous Winners

🥇 2015: ESEA Mock The Disabled

🥇 2016: No Award

🥇 2023: No Award

And The winner Is…

🥇 2024: Play Like S1mple

The year ended strongly with Evil Geniuses announcing a mascot that directed their fans to furry porn but in the end there could be only one winner. The project was officially announced in May after the greatest CS:GO player of all time, Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev, had teased that something big was in the works. Most at the time were hoping it would be a return to play or even announcing his own organisation but instead it was just another Counter-Strike tutorial website.

Well, hold on now… Not just any old Counter-Strike tutorial website. This one would give you insight from the greatest of all time. This would be like throwing a pigskin around with Tom Brady or having a kick around with Lionel Messi. You’d be crazy to miss this opportunity if you had serious aspirations of turning professional. To have that potential for the low, low price of $149 per year is insane value. And wait… There’s more.

Unmatched Talent: s1mple, possibly the greatest player in Counter-Strike history, will share his expertise and practical knowledge.

Legendary Experience: Comparable to legends like Jordan or Messi, s1mple will share secrets and best practices developed over more than a decade of play.

Career Development Resources: Gain insights into the esports industry and learn how to turn your passion for gaming into a successful career with guidance from industry experts.

FACEIT Community Support:

• Join a community of gamers and CS enthusiasts.

• Get tips and strategies directly from s1mple

• Connect with like-minded individuals worldwide.

Exclusive Content and Competitions:

• Access premium content.

• Participate in tournaments for the community.

• Have personal communication with s1mple and other top players, providing unparalleled insights into the world of professional gaming.

That is a copy paste from the official press release announcing the project. Bizarrely it was issued by the ESL FACEIT Group, owned by Savvy Games who are in turn owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund just in case you’d forgotten. This raised some serious questions around potential conflicts of interest. How can the largest tournament operator on the Counter-Strike circuit be in direct business with one individual player? What is the nature of that business? Who was paying who and how much? Was Kostyliev simply a front for what was a means to boost FACEIT engagement? Who were the “industry experts” that they had lined up?

Turns out ESL never had to answer any of those questions because fuck you. Get used to that by the way because of late they’ve extended their blacklist of journalists, gone after Youtube channels for using segments from their broadcasts and bought entire publications to write about how awesome and pioneering they are. I didn’t see a lot of reporting about how the supposed best esports tournament operator in the world could fuck up something as basic as a tutorial website for gaming nerds.

That type of project has existed for almost as long as competitive gaming has been around. Players don’t like losing and so better players, often professionals, can make money by explaining all the ways in which their students are dogshit. Counter-Strike has had many of these businesses run by professional players down the years and all of them end up at the same final destination, which is closure. Either the people running them get bored or the students realise that they can find equivalent content for free on YouTube. Really the selling point is the parasocial component of talking to someone you admire and ultimately that gets old quick.

One thing you can say about those websites is that they at least had something of a life cycle. It turns out that the “Play Like S1mple” course was just a bit shit all round. The warning signs were there when footage from a demo review, where Kostyliev sounded so utterly bored by what he was watching, made its way onto social media. In it the great one made a minor mistake jumping through an in-game window, which caused him to miss a critical timing for a tactic. Despite it being very apparent the error was his he breezed past his own mistake and instead focused on the error made by his team mate. The ridicule that resulted was hardly a great advertisement for the content.

Those who had paid found out quite quickly that the website was riddled with tech problems and many of the “lessons” that you could access on how to play with either gated off or didn’t exist. Out of all of the promises made almost none were delivered. There weren’t any private streams by Kostyliev. There weren’t any giveaways. None of the special guests or industry experts every materialised. There was a Discord channel and that was full of disgruntled customers demanding refunds. Not only was there no mechanism through which to demand one, the common wisdom shared in the channel was that you’d have to dispute payment through your bank. The website had supposedly attracted 80,000 sign-ups although it wasn’t clear how many of them were paying for the course. Regardless it was at the very least hundreds of customers that felt they had been bilked.

The handful of videos that did exist didn’t even seem to meet the demand of why someone would sign up in the first placed. Overproduced, featuring three different camera angles of Kostyliev sat at a PC for some reason, the final edits seemed to be little more than a stream of consciousness discussion about what professional teams do in the current meta. For anyone wanting to get better in their FACEIT games most of this advice would be a complete waste of time because even on a paid-for pugging platform teamwork is minimal and players don’t want to win as much as they want to get good stats.

The reviews on social media absolutely blasted the content and the general consensus was that “Play Like S1mple” was little more than a soulless cash grab that the player himself didn’t even seem to be overly enthused about. With more and more people demanding refunds and people who had paid for the course sharing their reviews of it online the project was dead by July. No grandiose press release from ESL explaining the courses abject failure, no public apology from anyone in charge and no replacement service. The website closed and it was like it never happened.

Players did get their refunds and there were even dickriders posing as journalists speculating the reason for the closure was that Kostyliev was being abused for it being too successful. In reality it was an ill conceived, poorly executed business venture that struck a blow to the likelihood of other similar projects being enacted in the future. Not only did it not teach anyone how to play s1mple but it dragged his reputation, one he had worked hard to improve down the years after many youthful mistakes in his career, and dragged it through the mud. Something that could have been great being half-assed by a gaggle of esports executives was par for the course in 2024 and speaking of courses I’ll shortly be announcing my own entitled “How Not To Fuck Up S1mple Things In Esports,” which I advise everyone involved with this shitshow to sign up for.