Seon-ho “xeta” Son was a south Korean professional CSGO player who recently switched to VALORANT.
In a recent interview with dbltap, he explained his side of the story on why he left Tyloo and switched to VALORANT. According to Xeta, one of the main reasons why he left the TYLOO was the language barrier. Since TYLOO mostly consists of Chinese players, communication was a bit difficult.
Furthermore, the virus situation didn’t help matters either. TYLOO couldn’t help Xeta to improve his Chinese to have better communication skills with his other teammates as the virus situation prohibited him from having a direct face to face communication with the organization. Additionally, the arrival of VALORANT gave him hopes to start a new journey.
Why CS:GO failed in Korea?
Even though all the other major tier-1 esports like League of Legends, Overwatch, thrive in Korea, CSGO just couldn’t make a huge dent in the Korean market. According to Xeta, PC Bangs was one of the major reasons why CSGO couldn’t gather any fan following in Korea.
Unlike most other places around the world, Korea has a pretty rich PC Bang culture. Back in 2004, Valve decided to charge 15 dollars per month for every single PC in a PC Bangs in South Korea. Consequently, the whole scene was dead overnight.
As PC Bangs decided to part ways with CSGO, the Korean scene also died down with it. This paired with the lack of sponsorships for the tournaments has made it difficult for pro players to survive. In order to have a successful esports scene, you need sponsors. On that front, CSGO was not viable for many sponsors.
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However, VALORANT kind of came as a shining beacon of hope for the Korean scene. As the League of Legends scene in Korea is pretty big, PC Bangs already have a pretty good relationship with Riot Games. And as a result, there will be a good chance that Korean players might find this game more intriguing than CSGO.
