Market Research Report for
Counter Strike: Global Offensive
Mathew Ngo ml.ngo@hotmail.com Report submitted to
Ultimo College | Sydney TAFE
01/06/2015
Certificate IV in Business Marketing
Market Research
Katherine Hardman
Executive Summary
Counter Strike: Global Offensive, otherwise known as “CS: GO” or just “CS” for short is the elected service for the following marketing report. Counter Strike is an online tactical first person shooter (FPS) video game. It was released on August 21, 2012 by Valve Cooperation and is seen as the most innovative online next generation titles for PC and consoles. At the time being there are 677, 701 players around the world and the numbers are only increasing exponentially.
Enclosed for this market entry report is to describe the marketing opportunities, pricing and player base of the Counter Strike community. Valve Cooperation has released many popular titles stretching from many different genres, some well- mentioned are Dota 2, Half- Life and the Left 4 dead series. Their main office headquarters is located in Bellevue, Washington in The United States of America.
Since the very first release of the Counter Strike games, Valve Cooperation has maintained its position as providing the highest quality video gaming service. The company is also known for their popular competitive tournaments which feature numerous teams from all over the globe competing to win a large sum of prize money. The company has a very high reputation for holding the cup as one of the current popular social online game in the world.
In Australia, Counter Strike has evolved the E-sports community like never before. There are national tournaments that are held across the states and teams competing internationally. In comparison to countries like the USA and Europe, the community is quite small. But nonetheless, Counter Strike is one of the few games where Australia has a team competing in major international tournaments.
In the wake of its success, Counter Strike has created a distinct and unique culture surrounding it. This includes the players themselves, professional teams and e-sports organisations gaining international fame and recognition as well as making a living by playing CS.
Results 7-12 How players were introduced to the game 7 Type of computer and ping 8 Other games played 9 Competitive Matchmaking 10 In-Game spending’s 11 E-Sports Competitive Scene 12
Conclusion 13
Recommendations 14
Bibliography 15
Appendix 16-19 Player behaviour statistics 17 Survey 19
Background
Valve Cooperation is the developer of one of the most recognised PC and console game in the world and will continue to dominate the FPS genre as well as the E-Sports scene. Not long before Counter Strike: Global Offensive was released, it appeared that the previous franchises were slowly dying as a whole. Counter Strike: Source was losing its popularity amongst gamers and other FPS titles were dominating the scene. Many organisations and the company struggled to keep CS alive in the competitive environment, to make matters worse CS: GO was not successful even after its first launch. Many pro players and the community were more inclined to stick to previous versions of the game. This created segregation within the community, one still playing the previous versions whereas the other playing the newly released.
For a while Valve did not make much impact on updating the game, CS: GO was basically community driven. Maps, game modes and many other in-game features were created by mods within the community and thrived even without the support of the developers. However, as E-Sports grew with the success of other games such as DOTA 2 and League of Legends. Valve began to put an effort by patching gameplays, maps and bugs on a regular basis. They began to understand the complaints made by the community and instituted itself into
