n0thing: "Owners would laugh if you told them you wanted to start a CS team"

Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore of Dust2.us spoke with American content creator and former pro player Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert after his Team USA lost to the Stream team featuring Mark "ohnePixel" Zimmerman in the BLAST.tv Austin Major Showmatch.

n0thing commented on the match, playing with the creator of Counter-Strike, Minh "Gooseman" Le, and the ins and outs of running an esports organization.

You can find the whole interview in video form below or underneath that in text form. All questions and answers have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Tough loss for North America today. Regrettable play against ohnePixel. Will the ohnePixel loss haunt you forever?

He offered me the Case Hardened AK if I threw, so it's a big win for me, actually.

That's huge gains, BLAST offered you $0, how much does a Case Hardened AK go for these days?

It's got to be $150,000, for the number one rated one.

You know more about this world than I do. You've clearly been looking at players and like what's the skin I can get from them?

You can tell I didn't get the skin because I would have known the float. NiKo has it, I think.

NiKo definitely has a lot of nice skins. He brings the $1 million AK to the tournament.

Is it $1 million, is that the one?

I think that's the one that was lent to him, yeah. Getting serious about the showmatch, was it a good time playing with EliGE, Skadoodle — your former teammate, Grim — who is the next generation of players, and then Gooseman, of course. Was that a good experience for you?

Yeah, it was fun. We were getting knife kills and stuff. I wish they mixed the teams up more to make it more fair, which sounds silly because we lost. It would have been more fun to either make it full troll or try more. It felt like we weren't sure, but it was fun playing with everyone.

We've been asking everyone what it's been like to play with Gooseman. For you, you have much more of a connection to him because you were a 1.6 pro and so you have much more of a living connection to the game that he built. Was that something that was special for you, to play with the guy who made the game where you became famous?

Yeah, it was neat. I got to talk to him for a few minutes. I never met him before, it was trippy. I didn't think that he was real for a while and so it was cool.

He's definitely someone who's been putting himself more out there, getting involved in the Counter-Strike scene, which is nice to see for our old legends of the game. Speaking of you, a legend of the game, a legend of CS:GO, and a legend of CS 1.6. What have you been up to since we last talked to you in June last year?

Kind of the same thing, bit of consulting, streaming, sponsor work. Just having a good time, hanging out, I have two kids.

You told our interviewer, Scoobster, last year that one of your dreams would be to make an esports organization. Is that something that's still on the table for you?

I talked to some investors last time and had some cool talks. Part of it is what I'm excited about, starting a Counter-Strike team. But an org has more to it, with talent, streamers, and these other things that are key for sponsors. I did a lot of due diligence. Pulling the trigger is something that I haven't done because I know what it requires and I know the bandwidth that I need to have to hit the gas for that project. Nothing's really been a spark for me. I just haven't felt the urge to make the push, yet.

Of course, we've seen a lot of streamers and content creators launch orgs in the past two years, especially in the VALORANT space. Moist Esports came into existence around the same time you made that interview. Seeing those guys struggle and be very candid about how hard it's been. We don't expect to make money in esports, but did that scare you off at all?

As you said earlier, I've been a part of orgs since Evil Geniuses in 2008. Since then, from EG to Complexity to Cloud9, even successful orgs that I've watched, the owners would laugh if you told them you wanted to start a team. As much as someone like Cloud9 has established a solid brand, had good partners, you look at the books and how much they've had to spend at certain times. Watching profits get eaten up, for the best brands out there, it can be tough. You have to be ready to pivot, you have to be paying attention to the community. Seeing things like Moist happen, it makes sense, if you want top talent, they're expensive.

Some top talent, especially in Counter-Strike, they just want to play. Unless you can get a bunch of sponsors for their team, which is harder nowadays than getting a sponsor for a big streamer. The brand is a focus of their program, where one of these sponsors may not be a focus for s1mple's gameplay for 95% of his day. Maybe he'll pop up on stream and the logo is there.

Some of these brands want more than just brand equity, they want cool activations and these things that take a certain group and team to procure this stuff. I'm sure in Moist that Ludwig knows how to make a brand and do all this stuff, he was probably laughing because he probably saw the writing on the wall. This is not as straight forward as it should be and as it is with the influencer side of things.

Obviously, a big focus of that is the brand building, it's the activations. Players just want to play, would that be a good piece of advice for younger players to start building their brand? It's not something we see as much now, is that some advice you'd offer to players, is to start growing their brand?

Yeah, I think some people just aren't as comfortable with it. Until we have the broadcast revenue of the NFL or MLB or something and you get that level of income. It's just a reality. For myself, even if I won every Major I played in, I couldn't retire on that money alone. The reality is, you have to be thinking about the business side of it. Unless you want to go get another job, some people are fine doing that.

I think it's wise for every young to player to try to not to be dislikable at the least. Try to be presentable. donk is edgy and doing his thing but it hasn't hurt his brand because he's insane and has fun being stoic. If he were to start streaming consistently he would crush. I think until the revenue from salary and winnings is enough to retire off of, and maybe it is in some places, most players here probably couldn't.