James Bardolph kindly dedicated some time from his busy schedule to sit down with us at the ECS Season 1 LAN Finals, to discuss his time in CS, casting, various tournament prize pools and his position as Vice President of FACEIT Media.
Aleksei: Hello James, how are you?
James Bardolph: Great!
Aleksei: How does it feel to be back in London?
James Bardolph: It’s good actually; it was a long trip in humid Atlanta, visited New York on the way back as well, which is always good. So yeah, it’s always nice to be home for a few days before we start disappearing again. Our first ECS finals as well, so, you know, it’s a good reason to come back.
Aleksei: You’re Vice President of FACEIT Media, what exactly does your job encompass?
James Bardolph: That’s a good questions, it’s kind of changing as the company continues to grow, but historically, I guess when I was first asked to take on that role, I guess it was mainly to make sure to partly cover broadcasting, which is essentially what FACEIT Media does, on-screen talent is a portion of it and I suppose being a confident decision maker when decisions need to be made. As an example, when you’re running leagues there are always going to be unexpected issues that come up, be it with a match, a bug or some kind of decision that needs to be taken between teams in a round. In the past especially, we had an era of DDOS, that doesn’t really exist anymore, at least in our game. The decision on the general direction of things, I push the creative direction of the shows we do, for example.
It’s not really defined on paper, so it’s a bit difficult to say. I think that’s what it’s been in the past, now we have a great team, you can see from the scale of these finals that things have gone up a bit. It might be changing somewhat in the future, but historically, at least, that’s kind of what it has been if that is a good description.
Aleksei: Yeah I think that was a very good description, you went through the entire thing.
Aleksei: Talking on the topic of ECS, we’re sitting in the Wembley SSE Arena, it’s absolutely astonishing. What sparked the decision to pick this venue in particular?
James Bardolph: I think it’s partly to do with the partners that we have. We’re a company based in London, so it’s always good to do something for the home crowd. We had finals last year in our studio, our old studio in our offices near Carnaby Street, which we are no longer in, but when we did them there, there was no space to host a live crowd. We’re aware that there are a lot of FACEIT fans , as well as the players that would have liked to go to that, so now they have the opportunity to come and see the players live.
I think the main thing was London and then with the scale of the league itself, $3.5million across the year, I think you have to have a suitably scaled up venue as well. Wembley Arena or SSE Arena, as it’s now called, seems to be appropriate.
Aleksei: In terms of organisational aspects of ECS, how long approximately did the logistics take to set everything up?
James Bardolph: You mean the league itself or the finals physically?
Aleksei: A round up of both.
James Bardolph: There are different people in FACEIT that are responsible for different things. Now that we’re doing this scale, I’m kind of hands-off on the production side of things. In terms of the physical logistics of our finals, I have had limited involvement in that, as I’ve been busy doing actual broadcasts, commentating the league, ELEAGUE as well. It’s hard for me to give you answers to those questions purely because I haven’t been involved in them so much.
I know that the creation of the league itself took many, many months because of the complexity of it. As for the finals, I wasn’t involved, so unfortunately I can’t really give you a great answer on that. I’m really impressed at how much is going on here, because again I was hands off with that being all over the place, in different countries as well. Part of it was a surprise even for me, but a good surprise, it looks absolutely great.
Aleksei: Absolutely.
Aleksei: I think it’d be fair to say that you’re best known for your casting, what’s your favourite part about casting?
James Bardolph: My favourite part about casting is the fact that I love the game. I’ve played it for roughly thirteen years, it has been a hugely significant part of my life, in nerdy ways and continues to be so, now basically my job. I think I’m fortunate, very fortunate, in the fact that I get to commentate a game which I love, as I wouldn’t be doing commentary otherwise. There are people who are talented multi-game casters, but Counter-Strike is basically the only game I play. I’ve played Overwatch as well, but I mean CS is my game. The best thing about casting it is that I love it. My hobby is my job, essentially.
Aleksei: Let’s not forget about your co-host, Daniel Kapadia, DDK. Could you tell me a bit about him? What do you enjoy about your duo?
James Bardolph: We spend a lot of time together because we’re casting all the time. It’s very important that we get along very well; otherwise it would be hard work. He’s definitely become a good friend.
He worked with FACEIT before I did, so we joined and just started to cast together, so it kind of just went on from there. Our personalities mesh together really well, I think we complement each other very well and obviously because we’ve been casting together for so long, it might be coming up to about two years, but the sheer volume of casting we’ve done in that period of time helps as well. It’s great.
The best things is that we’re allowed to be ourselves, FACEIT give me free reign to direct the shows and general casting as I please, which is fantastic. We don’t need to be rigid or stiff, we can just be ourselves. We don’t try to kind of be a certain type of caster, we just are ourselves, and we have fun. Fortunately for us, people seem to enjoy it for the most part, so that’s fantastic.
Aleksei: I can agree that you two are one of the most celebrated casting duos, personally I find you very entertaining to watch.
Aleksei: On a more serious topic, so to speak, we’ve seen various leagues like ECS and ELEAGUE emerge that boast larger prize pools that those at the Valve-endorsed majors. Do you feel that the introduction of such tournaments pressures Valve into taking the next step in terms of prize pools and developing the game?
James Bardolph: I think that these kinds of leagues are doing a good enough job and I think people can be obsessed with the “bigger dick race”, for lack of a better term, where “this has this much now, these guys have to do this”. For what? Who are these people going to please? It’s not something that is particularly necessary. I think going from $250,000 to $1million per major is sufficient in that regard. I think things are fine as they are going forward, so again, it’s not like a nuclear arms race. I don’t think it 
would be healthy if it became that.
I’m content with how things are at present, I think we had an inevitable oversaturation in terms of every man, woman and child trying to get into CS and put events on. Having some monster leagues helps prevent having too many leagues, so I think things look good for Counter-Strike. It’s good that there’s competition between those parties as well, because it forces everyone to improve, which benefits all the teams, all the players, which is great.
Aleksei: On the topic of TV broadcasts of not necessarily CS:GO in particular but eSports in general, I think it was on the 23rd that Sky announced Ginx TV to be added to their channel list, then we obviously have ELEAGUE broadcast to god knows how many countries, what are your thoughts on the matter?
James Bardolph: It’s good. There’s no down side to it, right? It’s more exposure, it’s exposure to people outside of eSports on television. I don’t think television is something we need to rely on and I think understanding that is important in its success, because we’ve seen games be on television in the past and people have tried to cater to television too far, to a point where they’ve compromised their own product.
Sometimes there can be a concern with say “terrorists” or “counter-terrorists” for this game in particular. People want to say “defenders” and “attackers” and other stupid crap, which is never going to fly, because bearing in mind there are 10.x million who play Counter-Strike, for example, they all know that its terrorists and counter-terrorists. I think it’s come to a point where people understand that they can stop apologising for who they are, for being what they are and just get on with it. It’s something people need to accept.
I think in terms of television it’s, one problem with Counter-Strike is it’s probably the best competitive game as a spectator, but because it’s a violent game it will be viewed, at least initially, by sponsors as something to stay away from. “Oh it’s violence, it’s encouraging violence” that kind of non-sense. I think over time they will realise that. I think Counter-Strike is on the verge of being pop-culture in the kind of way that Street Fighter is. I think that’s once they realise that the focus of the game is not on violence, but on strategy, which is communicated via violence in this case, if you want to put it that way. Once they understand that and realise it’s not actually a bad thing, then we will see more sponsors coming in, but in the short term, it may be difficult to sell inventory and so on, on television, because of the nature of the game. Long term we’ll get over that hump. Even though things have ramped up with Turner at this point, I think there are still higher rungs on the ladder to reach.
Aleksei: Another topic, a rather controversial one I’d say, approximately during the ESL Season 9 Pro League Finals, WESA was announced. What are your thoughts on that, maybe from the perspective of FACEIT. What implication can it have not only on event organisers but also on players?
James Bardolph: One thing I don’t like is when players are wheeled out to say “Hey, this is great, this is good, this is bad” which isn’t to say it is good or bad, but I just think that’s a cheap marketing ploy to try and convince the general player of the game that “Hey, this is great”. People should realise that that doesn’t really work, it just makes you look like you’re trying to convince people that something bad is actually good, so I don’t think that was very intelligent.
As to what I think of it in general, I would just say that all my questions and much more are covered by the video that Thoorin made, essentially. I think that it's a very concise video that raises many questions that people should think about and many wouldn’t realise to think about. I would just go to that video; it kind of covers any question that one should have.
While I’d like to give you specific answers, there are so many questions, so much to say. I’ll say look at Thoorin’s video because it was concise and is relevant.
Aleksei: Absolutely.
Aleksei: I’d like to thank FACEIT on my behalf for organising ECS, it has been an absolute pleasure, press day was amazing. Thank you so much for the interview and I hope ECS runs as planned and everything goes well!
James Bardolph: Thanks.
Images courtesy of Reddit and DreamHack Flickr/Sebastian Ekman
