CS:GO News Week in Review: January 18th

Fnatic wins StarSeries XIV

Fnatic took their fourth tournament in a row with their victory at the most recent SLTV StarSeries offline finals yesterday, taking a dominating 2-0 win over Natus Vincere. The Swedes took home $90,000 for their first place finish; check out our winner's news to get a full recap of both quick maps.

Titan shuts down

The French scene suffered a heavy blow this week with the announcement that Titan will be shutting down completely due to a lack of money after the KQLY cheating debacle that left a permanant mark on the company.

We were awoken by some pretty bad news, one of our CS:GO players was banned for cheating. This sent shivers down my spine, because it couldn’t have come at a worse moment. All the bad press that this brought and the major hit the image of an otherwise respectable brand took, was too much. Sponsors and partners with whom we were about to sign, understandably backed out of deals, not wanting to be associated with a company that had just been tarnished. Needless to say, our budget for 2015 had gone up in smoke from one day to another.”

ESL introduces ruleset changes.

In response to community demand, ESL made some landmark changes to their competitve ruleset fro their leagues and tournaments this week by introducing significant changes to bomb timers, deathcams, and after-round time. See the full changes here.

Questionmark wins Red Dot Invitational

The Danish squad has yet another title under their belt after defeating their French rivals EnVyUs this week to $25,000 first place prize. Questionmark came into the match with confidence after defeating Titan in the semifinals handily and it showed; the team took de_overpass 16:5, with the second map, de_cache, turning out to be just as one sided, capping off the day with a 16:7 victory.

IEM Katowice announced

An annual CS:GO tournament has been confirmed for Katowice again this week by ESL, with twelve of the best teams in the world coming together to fight for a piece of the customary $250,000 prize pool. For more information about this tournament, including invited teams, format, and schedule, read here.