Obviously I’m all for slight monetisation that will provide a constant stream of revenue for the CSGO developers and to grow and fund tournaments across the globe, but have they gone too far?

The Valve developers have just released a new update that offers music kits as an additional extra.

• Introducing Music Kits, featuring new music exclusively made for CS:GO by various artists and composers.
• When equipped, Music Kits replace all of the music in the game and include an anthem that plays whenever you are MVP.
• Music Kits can be shared through the scoreboard. Use the context menu to check out another players music.
• Music Kits are currently available as a special offer for CS:GO players.
• Added music volume controls for the following:.
  • Main Menu
  • Round Start
  • Round End
  • Map objective
  • Ten Second Warning
  • Death Camera

Now, some people might think that this is a great idea. In some cases it is, but it is over shadowing changes that are needed.

For example, GOTV isn’t great, the stream links on the front page of the game could be better, match making isn’t 128 tick, an international tournament organised by Valve for CSGO.

Let me outline each of these and how Valve can fix these a little better.

First off GOTV. Now GOTV has improved a lot, all games are now recorded and you can download/watch your last three games. You can watch live games and we now have caster audio ingame, for Valve tournaments.

This heavily leans towards Valve tournaments taking over and being the only tournaments, something which I don’t think will happen but we could see Valve tournaments outweigh other tournaments in both size and quantity.

GOTV should have the most popular live matches shown, it should download your matches when you close CSGO so you can watch more than your last three games. Streaming also needs to be embedded, with an option to watch through GOTV too. I don’t want to watch twitch.tv I want to watch CSGO streams ingame that’s why I loaded my game and not my browser.

Match making still isn’t 128 tick, this isn’t expensive for Valve (It will cost around 1.48% of Valves monthly income), even if it isn’t all match making servers it should still be implemented.

Though The International has been talked about there’s no clear evidence this is going to happen. Valve should have a case or to be honest it would have made the music kits less ridiculous if they had called them The International Fund. I would have happily paid for them then.

Overall, music kits are a step away from CSGO taking over LoL and SC2 as the biggest esport game in the world. I think CSGO can’t prosper as a public only game where people will play it for an hour and then go and play CoD and have exactly the same experience but without stickers, custom music, name tags, skins and silly money grabbing ideas.

Now it may seem like I’m very anti-money making content, I’d like to point out that I am all for evergreen revenue for Valve CSGO developers to carry on developing. However, I’d like the CSGO developers to listen more to the community. The community have been screaming for sprays, like in CSS and CS 1.6. They were loved back then, and they will be easy to implement and monetise just the same way stickers are now.

Focus on monetising with unobtrusive items, e.g. skins, sprays, stickers. This can then fund the changes that we actually want, 128 tick servers, more tournaments, better functions ingame and more, better maps.