Former Evil Geniuses player Timothy "autimatic" Ta released a video where he explained why, in his opinion, the North American Counter-Strike scene has drastically deteriorated. He highlighted several key factors contributing to the region's decline.

One of the main reasons, according to autimatic, was the retirement of popular streamers and players such as shroud and tarik. Autimatic emphasized that their departure heavily impacted the audience and community growth:

Shroud retiring. Now the second biggest reason is tarik retiring. And I know what you're thinking: Tim, you were so much better than both of them. Like the scene should have been able to live on even after they retired. And while I agree with you, I'm not talking about in-game wise, I'm talking about their streams were huge. I mean shroud was pulling in, I think, about 10,000 viewers every night, tarik was, you know, 5 to 10,000. And I think this did a lot for the CS community. For one, it brought a lot of eyes to the nightly FPL games, it brought a lot of fans, and overall it just brought a lot of support for teams like C9 for shroud and OpTic for tarik. We're just missing that right now.

 

Another reason autimatic highlighted was the release of Valorant, explaining how Riot Games new title specifically affected the North American CS scene:

The second thing that really hurt NA CS was, you guessed it, VALORANT coming out. Now, the reason why VALORANT hurt us so much was because it really shut off the talent pipeline. If you break up the NA scene back then in terms of tiers, obviously, this is a completely objective tier system, so who you see is objectively in that tier. So you had tier one pros, you had tier 2 pros, and you had tier three pros. Now, what happened when VALORANT came out—some Tier 1 pros went to VALORANT, I feel like almost all Tier 2 pros went to VALORANT, and then the tier 3 pros, they didn't go to VALORANT cuz they were going to get outshined by the tier 2 pros anyway. So most of them stayed in NA CS, and what that did was the tier 3 pros now became tier 2 players. So we didn't see the effects of VALORANT until later on because at the time all the teams were still intact—Team Liquid was still a team, EG was still a team, Gen.G we were still a team. But as things started happening such as tier one pros retiring, going to VALORANT, going to Europe—now that's when it started to become a problem, and the main reason for that is just there weren't enough players the tier one pros could pick up who were ready for their shot at tier one.

 

He also mentioned other problems facing the region, including a lack of organizational support, few tournaments, and the loss of veteran players capable of mentoring younger talent. Autimatic stressed that without experienced leaders, the North American scene is unable to compete effectively in Europe. According to autimatic, the solution lies in content creation and the return of veteran players who can pass their knowledge on to the next generation.