Pete on Endpoint returning to Counter-Strike: “I guarantee you it won’t happen this year.”

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Endpoint Counter-Strike were, once upon a time, the uncontested best team in the UK for many years. They were so good that they didn’t need to concern themselves much with the UK scene at all. Winning 10 ESL Premiership titles, Endpoint were also a constant force in European Tier-2 Counter-Strike, even once beating NAVI at ESL Pro League Season 16. But that’s the past, and today, Endpoint doesn’t even have a CS roster.

Endpoint’s Counter-Strike team was dropped at the beginning of February this year, but Endpoint as an organisation is still very much involved in UK CS, especially at the grassroots level. The organisation runs the most competitive UK league: the UK and Ireland Circuit, or UKIC for short. On the 17th of June, the finals of the sixth iteration of the UKIC League Division 1 took place at the Red Bull Gaming Sphere in London.

UKCSGO was able to catch up with the COO of Endpoint, Peter “Pete” Thompson, to talk about the state of UKIC and some of the upcoming changes to the league, including VRS integration. Pete also touched on the state of Endpoint’s return to Counter-Strike with a new roster, and the partnership deal with Red Bull to hold the finals at the Red Bull Gaming Sphere in London instead of at Endpoint HQ in Sheffield.

To start things off, how do you feel about the state of UKIC at the moment?

I think it’s in an okay place, we’ve been pretty steady, which is a nice thing in the UK scene. I think there aren’t many steady things right now. To be in a steady place for the last six seasons or seven seasons, in fact, with Season 0, is quite nice. Obviously, stuff is going to change quite a lot for Season 7, with making sure that we are VRS eligible.

We had a bit of a back-and-forth in the office about it. UKIC is all about grassroots; we want to be able to support grassroots. From anyone who wants to play for fun with their friends casually, all the way to being a professional. If you really want to do that, we have to have VRS support.

Even though that only supports the top two or three teams top teams, if we ever want a UK team to get further, back into the international scene, we have to be able to support that.

FFACT, fair play, he did a lot of work on that, to make sure we have a model that actually works and also supports the scene from hopefully the grassroots level all the way to professional. I’m quite excited about that, and we’ve seen some decent growth. If you take a look at the numbers for how many teams compete in UKIC, the UK scene’s pretty healthy in that sense, we get a lot of teams.

So, would you say that’s the main goal of the next season? To elevate the grassroots scene much further, or do you have any other aspirations with the changes next season?

I think, more than ever, you can have more competition, and competition is a good thing for business, but more than ever, the UK scene needs more events. Things like EPIC.LAN are fantastic. If you’ve got EPIC.LAN, you’ve got UKIC. Maybe if you could have one or two others, that’s where you might start getting enough VRS points for UK teams to actually grow into having shots in CCTs or other events.

I think if you only have one or two doing it, you’ll never get enough teams to get the VRS points up and to be able to actually get teams playing and money invested back into the scene, because they might have a chance at a major. In terms of aspirations for it, really, we need to keep it sustainable. It’s very hard to fund, in a horrible way. Yeah, just keep trying to make it sustainable, which is tough. Especially to keep it free to play for everyone.

Thinking back to the start of UKIC and back to Season 0, what did you feel were the original goals when you created UKIC?

I always wanted to try and feed into something else. So we were really close at one point, we actually signed a deal with CCT to be the regional partner. So you would get slots in CCT. They did this whole thing with regional partners, they signed deals with all sorts of places, and then they just pulled the plug on it. It was a real shame because I actually think that would have allowed us to have some grassroots that fed into Tier-2 or Tier-3. That was always the goal that we fed into something because we’re not going to be the next ESL or BLAST, we’re not trying to be Tier-1. But we need to offer that pathway.

I also would just love to build a big community, which is always tough. Outside of Counter-Strike, I would love to be in more games in the future. That’s just, again, a funding issue, and if we can get sponsorships and so on. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of Counter-Strike. There’s only so far you can go; the scene will go only so far. I don’t think it’s going to grow tenfold over the next however many years, the UK scene that is.

I just hope we’re a place that people can play and actually improve and grow, or make friends. I used to play Counter-Strike back in the day, and I still have people I reach out to who I played with 20 years ago. That’s the beauty of gaming that we need to have with UKIC.

There’s going to be a lot of changes to the top UKIC divisions. How will this impact the collegiate level?

Collegiate wise, we’ve struggled in some seasons. Obviously, with the universities having busy periods, you could call them where they have exams and other things, we’ve seen numbers drop massively. To the stage where we’re offering a £1000 prize pool for collegiate, and you’re only getting five teams. Is that worth it? You wouldn’t be able to make any money on that.

So I think we’re going to do two seasons that are full proper ones, and then we might do the odd event that’s separate. Try to make it so that when we do something with collegiate, it’s done properly, and we actually get enough teams to make it worth it. I would love to keep going with collegiate. If we want to improve in the future, we should do more than Counter-Strike, but those plans are not necessarily here and now; they’re dreams for the future.

Is there any chance of a return to the four-team LAN like in Season 0.

It’s one I’ve always wanted to do. We had this really horrible business scenario with it. So we did for Season 0, the feedback was amazing, everyone loved it, and I loved it; it was a great event. I’m pitching to sponsors all the time to try and get someone to buy into that four-team LAN and have that great thing for UK CS. It wouldn’t even cost that much more, but the issue is that we rent out bootcamp rooms for pracrooms for example.

If we rent out a bootcamp room for a week or two weeks or whatever, as a bootstrapped company where we need the money, we can’t have all four rooms taken for a one or two-day event because it blocks a month’s booking or a two-week booking. At the end of the day is very much needed for us to stay alive, as a company. If we can get someone to fund it, then definitely, we’re up for that. I’ll pitch for Season 7 for it to be that way to a couple of sponsors, I’m not saying we’ll get it because I don’t think we will.

Four teams LANs, I’d love to do it every time, but it costs a lot more money. Actually, with the VRS now, we have four apartments in Sheffield that we rent. Four three-bedroom apartments. For a two-team LAN, is great everyone goes into those apartments, really nice quality and a two-minute walk from the HQ. With VRS, every single team needs to be in the same accommodation, and you need to have fair accommodations across all.

So if you’ve got four teams, that’s 24 people potentially, 20 to 24 people. We’d have to get hotels for everyone because we can’t fit them all in the apartments. It actually scales the costs up more than you’d think to get four teams rather than two, which is a shame.

The actual format of UKIC from the league phase to the playoffs and the LAN finals has remained quite similar over the last seven seasons. Is there going to be any shakeup to the format for VRS?

The format is completely changing. Every season, there will be open qualifiers to get into Div 1. There is an Open Division outside of that where you can actually qualify for Div 1 as well. We will also have a division for people who don’t want to have the competitive side. So it’s just like a fun division, so it could be staff teams, for example, we’ll be making it so there’s an ELO cap on that as well. So it’s not just someone farming it for fun.

Talking about Endpoint Counter-Strike specifically. NXT, were free agents for a long period of time, was there any consideration given to NXT to bring them into the Endpoint brand?

Unfortunately, I’d love to say the answer is yes, but realistically, no. We love all the guys in that team, I think they’re great. Counter-Strike’s this weird space where you either have to be in Tier-1 or two and competing for a major, or you have to be on the cusp of it, to have the cycle of money work within it. So a team that’s 150- 200 in the world is actually not worth the salary. They deserve a salary and they need to, to progress.

To be able to actually monetise that team, I hate to say it in a negative way, you can’t actually monetise that team. As much as we would love to, sentiment-wise, we would be shoving money up the wall or whatever the saying is. We actually, nearly, at one point, back in the day, picked up arTisT as an AWPer. I think he’s great, you know, personality-wise, he does have the skill, and he brings a lot to a team. So at one point, we nearly picked him up. I’m not sure anyone knows that, so there you go.

Obviously, we’re not in Sheffield at the moment for this season; we are down in London at the Red Bull Sphere. How is that partnership with Red Bull? Is it a long-term thing?

No, it’s just a one-season thing, to try out, see if it works. Actually, we were talking about a four-team LAN. If this goes well, they are open to the conversation. That we could potentially do four-team LANs with them. It’s kind of a, dip the toes in and see if they like it, see what works. They’re nice to work with, they actually did a really cool thing, anyone who competed in UKIC this year, you put your name down on a list and you receive a crate of 24 Red Bull. We sent out over 200 crates, which is no small feat. It’s a cool, nice added thing to do for the community, especially for a free event.

Does Endpoint have any immediate plans to come back and field a Counter-Strike roster?

I would beyond love to be back in it. It’s my passion as well. I played Counter-Strike when I was a kid. Until we can get something that can fund it properly, it just wasn’t sustainable in the end. We hope to be back in Counter-Strike, I guarantee you it won’t happen this year.

What kind of changes would you want to see in the circuit as a whole to help orgs like Endpoint or other orgs that have stepped away from Counter-Strike, to entice them back into the scene?

It’s a difficult one. Players will need to be reasonable in some ways. They are getting that way anyway, they’re not exactly unreasonable. You need a sponsor who backs you to do it. For the first three years of Endpoint, my business partner and I were putting money in every month, and we had a Counter-Strike team then. We were paying £500 a month in salaries or something back then. Right now, that probably gets you the best team in the UK. At that level, if you’ve got owners that are working at the same time and it’s their hobby to make it into a really good job, that’s affordable for a lot of people who have an income, to support that

I think you have to be around for a couple of years before you start getting opportunities, and there will be opportunities for UK esports in the years to come, but you have to be around at that time. If you’re not around, you won’t get them, you can’t jump in when the opportunity’s gone, you need to be there. It’s a long-term play, but it’s also a passion project, otherwise, you won’t survive.