FLASHPOINT tournament series has sunk into oblivion

According to journalist Jacob Wolf, the FLASHPOINT tournament series, organized by FACEIT and Pinnacle Esports, ceases to exist. The main reason why the championships that came to replace the ECS series have sunk into oblivion is the rapid departure of the co-founding organizations from the discipline.

The tournament series, created at the beginning of 2020, was preparing to become a response to the rapid expansion of ESL and BLAST. Building the foundation for the franchise ecosystem, the organizers enlisted the support of eight clubs: c0ntact Gaming, Cloud9, Dignitas, Team Envy, FunPlus Phoenix, Gen.G Esports, MAD Lions and MIBR.

Currently, only two of the eight co-founding organizations of FLASHPOINT have not left the discipline - Cloud9 and MIBR. At the same time, most of them left CS:GO more than a year ago, while Dignitas resigned last week.

As a result, in two years, FLASHPOINT organized only three full-fledged championships, one of which fell on the RMR tournament, separating itself from the general logic of the competition.

The winner of FLASHPOINT 1 was the MAD Lions team, as well as the second season was left for Virtus.pro. However, the Los Angeles studio, built specifically for the championships, has been inactive for the past two years.

Although the parent site Flashpoint B has not yet legally ceased to exist, its board has only two members - representatives of MIBR (a subsidiary of Immortals) and Dignitas. At the same time, the tournament operator fired the remaining employees back in January, predicting the imminent closure of the project.

According to sources, many FLASHPOINT officials are blaming the impact of the coronavirus on their ability to host tournaments, but some also feel jaded by the financial model of the current North American scene. Other representatives have criticized the very idea and argue the opposite - the teams bit off more than they could swallow, out of arrogance and greed, in order to usurp their competitors.

The economy is the problem that the FLASHPOINT Tournament Series promised to solve by allowing teams to make better use of the funds created by the organizers, while eliminating the intermediaries that exist in the ESL Pro League.

FLASHPOINT cost each of the participating teams $2 million, which almost disappeared. Cloud9, c0ntact Gaming, Dignitas, Team Envy, Gen.G Esports, MAD Lions, MIBR, and FunPlus Phoenix all invested $16 million up front in the league and didn't see a return. At the same time, the tournament series has only two sponsors: Pinnacle and Unikrn bookmakers. Since the organizers held their third event in May 2021, it has generated little to no revenue.