JasoR Reveals the Reasons for His Retirement

Last week, one of the biggest legends of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competitions in the last four or five years, Jason ‘JasonR’ Ruchelski announced that they will be retiring from active play, but he will not be leaving OpTic Gaming. He announced that he will remain under contract with the organization. However he will only be streaming in the future.

Many were surprised with that news as rarely anyone expected that he will be retiring. At that time he never spoke about the reasons why he decided so abruptly to finish his career as a player. Other players from the team have indicated that the reasons might be the fact that he did not consider himself as a good enough player to stay in the team permanently.

Because of that and because streaming provides stable financial income for almost all players who decided to step down from their teams. It seems that JasonR might have opted to leave from the competitive play. However, last night, in one of the streams, JasonR wore heart on his sleeve, and he spoke about the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive scene and the reasons for his retirement.

Comparison to Mike ‘shroud’ Grzesiek

During his stream last night, he compared his situation with the one in which Mike ‘shroud’ Grzesiek was not that long ago. He said that shourd still has that drive for competing. Because of that his streaming channel does not require a lot of maintenance. On the other hand, JasonR’s drive for competing in CS:GO is not as it was before. He does not have that kind of luxury of not maintaining his streaming channel regularly.

He also said that one of the main reasons why some players decided to retire is the financial situation. In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive scene, the situation seems to be much worse than in other eSports competitions.

CS:GO scene as one big bubble

Besides that, he also said that CS:GO scene, and especially CS:GO scene in North America is in big problems. Nobody is making money expect the leagues. Players have salaries because organizations are contractually obliged to pay them. However those organizations are not making a lot of money. In the majority of cases they do not ever earn enough to pay those salaries.

Before the end of the his stream, JasonR also indicated that CS:GO scene might be facing huge problems in the near future. This is not because of the lack of popularity. In fact all the profit is centralized in the hands of few people and companies. This will eventually lead to more and more players and organizations leaving the competition.

Fear of being replaced

Towards the end of last night’s stream, JasonR also said few words about the reasons he left the team. His biggest fear seems to be that he might be replaced in the team very easily. Some young and talented player might appear out of nowhere. He did not want to be put in that situation. That was one of the reasons why he left OpTic Gaming last week.

In the end, the predictions that he talked about during his stream does not seem to be good for CS:GO scene at all. He is not the first player to talk about this kind of issues. However he is the biggest name that came forth with these kinds of statements about the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive scene.