ESL director discusses issues at IEM Rio Major: It did not disturb the spirit of competition
Shaun Clark, ESL Product Management Director, gives his take on some of the much-debated controversies from Rio.
PCs crashing down during matches, fans giving out crucial information to the players on stage, and a questionable crowd turnout for multiple playoff matches.
These are some of the problems and concerns the esports organizers from ESL faced during the newly-concluded Major in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On that ground, it’s fair to say that the $1.25 Million tournament hasn’t been as smooth of an endeavour as ESL hoped.
Right before the Grand Final on Sunday, we caught ESL’s Product Management Director, Shaun Clark, to discuss IEM Rio Major and some of the obstacles they experienced, which also have caused heavy criticism from the CS:GO community.
- Overall, I think tournaments are running on the technological wheel that they need to rely on and sometimes the software and all the different variables happen. Unfortunately, it’s really difficult to circumvent that. I think any esports organizer on the planet runs into these. We ran into a few at this event, but we don’t think it disturbed the spirit of the competition that we wanted, Clark said when we him asked about the technical issues that happened at IEM Rio.
Shaun Clark continues:
- A lot of the issues were actually unrelated to each other. So, it may have seen from, let’s say the naked eye, that they [ESL] are experiencing a lot of the same. Actually, that’s not quite the case. To be fair we play on very high-end PCs. The challenge we run into was a little bit of power. You may have seen the venue turn completely off. We had a team kick out a power line underneath where they are competing.
You can watch the entire interview with Shaun Clark down below, where he also touches on the low crowd turnout at some playoff matches.
