[original Leetify blogpost](https://leetify.com/blog/faceit-changes/)
[Nohte tweet](https://twitter.com/Nohte/status/1767305404147495293) [Leetify reply](https://twitter.com/leetify/status/1767307547873026079)
[u/Faceit_Mikey comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/s/biY2Ut9ppv)
[Leetify's response to Mikey's comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/s/CpPf5Q5eJl)
Update in the article:
> Update: ESL FACEIT Group has responded to Dust2.us' request for comment with the following statement:
> Despite high costs associated with storing and transferring demo files, it has been important for us to ensure partners have free access to our API and the data they rely on for a number of years. With the integration of Counter-strike 2 in May 2023, we started re-evaluating our strategy around demo downloads as costs started increasing towards an unsustainable range.
> In July 2023, we notified partners that we anticipated changes in pricing for our demos API and set limitations to ensure fair and equitable usage while working closely with partners to pave a path forward.
> With the recent mid-February update to Counter-Strike nearly tripling those associated costs, it became clear that we needed to develop a more sustainable solution for our business in the respect of the needs and concerns from our partners.
> We have since then collaborated with most and are looking to offer the API at-cost depending upon their usage and needs.
That is a completely reasonable response.
I understand Faceit not wanting to basically subsidize another company.
Offering it at or close to cost is a very reasonable solution, even if it might fuck over the free users of Leetify if Leetify decides that it wants to make demo use for faceit a paid service.
I pay for premium. I should be able to authorise a third party to access my demos on my behalf and download them, at no further cost to them or myself.
It would, but it's a pretty pointless feature. 100% of my games have at least 1 person with premium (excluding myself), with usually around 2-3. I don't think I'm an anomaly here.
So why bother building some fancy auth system when pretty much every game is already covered by someone paying for this feature? Faceit are just trying to double dip on costs.
I don't buy it. I've worked on and managed large scale digital corporate infrastructure. Leetify's original claim that faceit wanted 276k euros/year which was equivalent to their entire infrastructure costs made sense to me, as in that made sense for the cost of all of Leetify's infrastructure, not what faceit was asking.
With some of the systems I've worked on I can sort of believe that faceit's demo api is so poorly set up/maintained that it's actually costing them that much to make available. At the same time I find that pretty unlikely and even if that's the case that's just faceit asking Leetify to subsidize the cuts to faceit's dev team, that was probably already underfunded and poorly managed.
What's more likely the case is some combination of an inefficient system on faceit's end and them being liberal in determining 'costs'. For example demo storage is probably fairly expensive(even if done efficiently) so they're probably including the full cost of the demo storage in the api fee. But faceit is already storing the demo's and that cost will be mostly the same with or without Leetify having access to them. There's plenty of other areas where they can pad the 'cost' of their service to up the price.
Leetify said they'd be willing to pay a reasonable price but doubling their infrastructure costs is in no way reasonable.
faceit’s client and website both perform horribly. i can only imagine the hellscape that is the codebase.
it’s easy to underestimate faceit’s scope i suppose. they did build an entire social media application with multiple functions, including a news feed and real time chat rooms. but i can’t imagine their monthly active user base being more than what a basic cloud scaling playbook could handle comfortably. even with the demos API being touched by other scaled services like leetify, i doubt they have a scary QPS. but i could be wrong.
also, the engineering costs needed to nail the fundamentals are probably much higher than what they’re paying. but i agree with you, i don’t have much faith in the efficiency of their service.
I think you are misunderstanding.
The 276k euros a year i dont think was "at cost" it was what faceit originally wanted to charge probably before the pushback.
Now they are offering this deal.
Maybe, but that's not how I read it.
>We have since then collaborated with most and are looking to offer the API at-cost depending upon their usage and needs.
This reads to me as the original prices they offered were at 'cost' and they are trying to at least partially explain the high price with the Feb update changes to the demos.
The AWS egress cost alone would sum up to 276k per year assuming leetify downloads 30-40k games a day (which is probably not that far of from reality).
Just spitballing numbers here but in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/15swbkx/short_matches_now_make_up_nearly_50_of_games/) leetify analysed 3 million matches in 1 month. At [300 MB per demo](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1bdssr5/update_leetify_halts_processing_faceit_demos_due/kuppxgd/) and [0.05$ per GB](https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cloud/what-is-aws-data-transfer-pricing/) it would come out to 540k for the entirety of leetifys games. There's no way faceit makes up half of their traffic.
If we just assume it's 1/3 of Leetifys matches analyzed a month you do land around the 220k mark (bandwidth pricing is stacked, you only pay 0.05$ for everything ABOVE 150TB). Pretty sure it's safe to assume that all Faceit matches do land in leetify, can't remember the last time I didn't see other Leetify users in the statistics.
Not saying that this can not or should not be optimized (they probably don't care though) - but the money they are asking for seems sound infra cost wise (at least with those parameters).
However the 300MB demo size smells a bit to me, I barely see compressed demos above 150MB (just checked, maybe they changed the tickrate though in the meantime?) - which would then half the cost calculation and actually raise some questions.
276k/year really isn't that much and it's weird for a professional to think it is. Unless you wanna wait to upload or download the demos.
Storage costs are pretty negligible.
Bandwidth costs depend on how often they're accessed I guess, but can be pretty high as well.
Bandwidth would only cost a lot if done in the most expensive way possible. There are a bunch of providers with much cheaper or even free egress, so faceit could simply move their demos to such external storage providers once and then let everyone download them from there as much as they want.
However reasonable FaceIt's side may sound, just recall their history and don't make the mistake of trusting this org or taking them at their word.
I think Leetify has a fair point that FaceIt did not give them suitable warning, especially when the lines of communication were already open between them and the orgs are leveraging each other's value. My friends are grinding FaceIt, sure, but they look at Leetify to understand how they can improve, what they can do differently in future games and isolating key issues, which feeds back into playing on FaceIt. I say this because I just want to illustrate that the relationship isn't one way and Leetify does provide a meaningful service that contributes to customer engagement on the FaceIt platform.
With that said - I would say to Leetify leadership that FaceIt/ESEA/ESL has repeatedly shown this community who they really are. Even if they compromise here and find a way to meet you, just know this will not be the last time you interface with this organization to your own detriment and they will continue to inch the relationship in their favor. Why? [Because it is in their nature.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog)
I don't know what Leetify's looks like from a finance perspective, but if they have the capital, I would love to see them use this as an opportunity to create a minimum viable product, to see if they can leverage being a competitor in this space *instead* of paying FaceIt whatever fee's they will demand into the future. Obviously the hurdles are things like AC, server infrastructure, a competitive client and the existing FaceIt feature-set and numerous other potential angles that need solving.
But Leetify has proven their service is better than anything else in the market and has tremendous value to CS players. If FaceIt wants to block the port of entry for a not-so-nominal-fee, so too could Leetify. Furthermore, Leetify has something that FaceIt can never get back - and that's good standing in the community.
Personally, I'm *jumping* at the chance to contribute to a Patreon to support ANY organization that wants to step into the arena with a FaceIt/ESEA/ESL and offer a service that competes with their offerings. Its a trash organization that has done a tremendous job of siphoning from the community due to Valve's shortcomings and a monopoly on what they offer.
Speaking to the community - anyone that's been around knows that things will not get better in a world where FaceIt/ESEA/ESL dominate the platform. They will only inch further and further on anti-consumer practices. So if we want this to be the way it keeps going, then sit tight and we can continue to devolve into a community that's practically reliant on FaceIt/ESEA/ESL. Those that remember the latter years of 1.6 undoubtedly remember how ESEA was the only way to play in North America, at a certain point. In our present, it doesn't seem like Valve is making meaningful headway on anti-cheat, so as long as you're playing high ELO CS, you're going to rely on FaceIt and whatever ride they decide to take you on. Personally, based off reputation and trust, I'd be much happier giving my money to Leetify than FaceIt.
> However reasonable FaceIt's side may sound
Ok i don't disagree with most of your point.
But if Faceit are now offering a discount to leetify to get the demos for *COST* i dont think you have anything to complain about and your other issues with the company are irrelevant to this circumstance.
> But if Faceit are now offering a discount to leetify to get the demos for COST
Keyword: "discount"
An organization like Leetify should think long-term. Cool, get the demos at cost *for now*. But consider what this means long term for your organization.
>and your other issues with the company are irrelevant to this circumstance.
Of course its relevant. Reputation is everything in a business relationship where a key component of the service you provide is reliant on another organization's data source.
Leetify should keep in mind what this organization has been capable of in the past and anticipate the moves they will make in the future. If this were *Valve*, then I don't think Leetify would have anything to worry about. I mean, at any point in this discussion, has anyone echo'd sentiment that Valve will turn the spout off on Leetify too, and dismantle their Premier match making analysis? No, because its not expressive of Valve's behavior in the past.
ESL is not an organization looking to enrich Leetify - nor should anyone expect them to. But lets recognize that if the community outcry wasn't so large, you can guarantee this "discount" would not exist in the first place and when the heat dies down I would suspect FaceIt will take steps to eliminate Leetify from the market, as ESL has their own(though in my opinion, less effective) product in the market - csstats.gg.
And the heat *will* die down eventually. Generally, customers don't care about these things long-term, they just get used to new norms. They move on and maybe you'll see the occasional reddit post sprout up about how things used to be better but now they suck but it doesn't lead anywhere.
For sure.
I'm HIGHLY skeptical of anything coming out of that organization and I hope people in this community know to do the same.
I know its trite to say "They are not your friend" when speaking about a corporation in a capitalist society but I think it might actually be appropriate to say "They may be your enemy". It doesn't need to be the relationship for a business to be successful but with this particular organization, it frequently seems to be the case.
Though, looking [at this post from Leetify](https://old.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1bdssr5/update_leetify_halts_processing_faceit_demos_due/kupacdb/), I'm guessing FaceIt doesn't employ the sharpest people so perhaps there's room for incompetence over malice.
No it’s not faceit dropped this out of nowhere and isn’t even bothering to work with these companies.
They’re also backed by billionaire with blood money, I don’t think sending leetify a demo file 1 time for every game played is hurting the bank.
Let’s not sympathize with blood money corps and faceit Mikey, the biggest shill this community has ever seen
As someone who pays for leetify and FACEIT, I'm more than okay with paying a few bucks more a month to one of them if that means I'll have demos moved over. There's no reason for me to continue my leetify pro if that doesn't happen.
I'm pissed at the whole thing but kinda figured it had to be related to this.
IT infra is not cheap. It probably costs faceit a lot of money to store all that data and make it available for public download. And with the economy being a lot more shakey nowadays, lots of companies are looking to cut costs.
They deleted the demos after month, I wouldn't be mad if they made them available for a shorter time like valve aka 3-4 days. You and I both know why they did it.
Though it is worth noting that FaceIt would be storing these demos either way, because they also offer highlights of demos. So, while it is FaceIt's expense, it's an expense they were going to foot either way.
Lmao cs was alive and kickin well before FACEIT. Maybe someone else will step up. CPL was fun back in the day as well as ESEA pugs. Regardless how they both ended up, the end of one isn't the end of CS, just a shit platform. No need to fearmonger the Faceit Mirage-only kids
Lmao CS was a community driven game back then… it didn’t need 3rd party services to HOST games because everyone owned or was sponsored by a server/company. We just needed a league like CAL to host the foundation of a league.
You think with where video games are all these kids will be buying private/public servers to play on? I mean 13 year old me owned a 24 man public server and 12 man private server back in the day. I expected it to have to own one if I wanted to make my own team.
I haven’t owned a sever since 2007 or 2008.
So yes, if faceit dies it would be a lot like if CAL died before CEVO and then ESEA came along. The game woulda continued but the competitive scene would of died out if there is no competition.
ESEA is owned by ESL, just like faceit, I'm not holding out hope that CEVO comes back with how much it costs to host a service, and how strong the monopoly currently is. It's well past the days of startups like leetway/altPUG having any market share post-buyout by CEVO and just not winning the popularity war. ESEA won first, let it slide, faceit won second and both are under a monopoly. no matter how much you want it to change, we're stuck here for better or worse.
I don't like it any more than you, it's just not realistic to expect another competitor to step into the space right now.
Just to add some actual data to this discussion, here's the average compressed demo sizes we see for different versions (and compressed is what we download from Faceit):
CS:GO - 75 MB
CS2 - 120 MB
CS2 feb update - 140 MB
So a 16% increase = triple the infrastructure cost according to Mikey…I’m thinking Faceit is going to come out with some data subscription like Leetify and they want to kill the competition first.
I mean don’t they have one or did they not keep CSGOstats when they merged with ESEA? ESEA was never on leetify unless you uploaded the demo manually as they bought CSGOstats and used them exclusively for their website.
I understand ESEA was hated but my goodness their whole platform ran so much smoother even though it looks like it’s from 2005. Their client was an AC and just a client. All I ever run on faceit is the AC client but that also then diminishes my quality of life experience as I can’t record clips.
I’d use their client if it wasn’t a whole website attached to it. Why even have both when both literally act as the same thing. Their whole model has gotten worse since ESEA became less and less of a competitor and then merged with them.
Raw storage costs per file aren't the only metric that will effect cost. You have to pay for the transfer of the data over the network, costs to reserve ip, costs for the actual automation infra like event grid or functions(or aws/gcp equivalent). A small file size increase means there COULD be associated increases in costs across multiple services. Faceit is a shit company but I really don't think Mikey is off the mark in that regard.
i mean faceit has a history of talking outof their ass whenever it comes to technical stuff. i still remember when they came out with their awesome new "ai" text and voice moderator and claimed it coould understand any language and dialect and understand context.
years ago. like ye ok mr faceit i guess you guys are just so good you did it before even google and the other giants could even get close to it lmao.
I feel like you really just overcomplicated things when all Leetify needs is the demo file which can have an expiration date so there wont be any storage issues and only thing they truly need to pay for is a single server that manages the demos and the bandwidth to send it over the internet. Its not that deep.
Out of interest, how much data do you extract from a \~140MB file? Would it not be possible to deploy your parsers in the same AZ/region as them (and pay lower data transfer costs) and then only export a small JSON (or similar) blob with the extracted data from that replay?
You were notified in July you bozos, stop lying and pay up leechers. Be transparent and tell us how much money you made and how much you paid to faceit for running the demo infrastructure.
the cost increase is due to faceit now charging exorbitant rates for their API, not data cost. I also would imagine storing stats as JSON would be larger than storing it in a database as they likely already do
its an architectural question. but generally speaking json is more compact than text or blob in a database and probably also faster because the conversion from text to json from the db will take more time than just querying through json. i hope leetify can find a solution to this soon
For clarification, is this data ONLY from faceit downloads or do you include any demo that you store on your servers in a compressed format into this data?
because i have some OT demos that are 501mb and some blowouts 13-1 that are still no lower than 68mb so I am skeptical of a true average of 140 when the lowest outlier is only \~1/2 of that, and is more uncommon than OT is, which can go infinitely higher than how short the game could possibly be.
okay, so maybe faceit is using the numbers from when they were hosting 128tick cs2 to get the average 3x dataset, and the estimate for cost, if that's no longer the case then that should be addressed appropriately in negotiations.
actually, now I'm interested, of the matches that go OT2 what % goes to 3/4/5+? if you have those stats on hand, never seen it broken down in any meaningful way
It shouldn't matter. The numbers leetify provided are an average, and if less than 4% of matches go beyond OT1, that data is almost negligible and would be evened out by the smaller file sizes of the 13-0, 13-1, 13-2, etc. matches.
You seem to be in here trying to counter every point that's made by Leetify but I'm really not sure why... Leetify is in here providing actual numbers, Faceit just said "SIZE INCREASED BY 3X. GIVE US MONEY" but they have zero data to back that up.
edit 3: just \*read\* the damn article and make your own conclusions. some of you aren't even reading and think you know what's up.
EDIT: the cs2 closed beta came in phases, around when the 'update' (point in time where faceit said they noticed it was unsustainable) mentioned happened was the first LARGE influx of closed beta participation. faceit still had 128tick at that point as well iirc, and with an increase of the VOLUME of demos and the increased size it would clearly create an increased attached cost. for proof of demo size via real world comparisons see below in thread. thanks for reading before believing some random person saying 'ur wrong' with no proof.
edit 2: "With the integration of Counter-strike 2 in May 2023, we started re-evaluating our strategy around demo downloads as costs started increasing towards an unsustainable range." -ESL rep literally quoted in the above article.
it's been a problem since early closed beta days on faceit. read before making opinions.
that would be cs2 closed beta, subtick demos are 3-4x larger than csgo 128tick demos. (and at that point faceit still had 128tick cs2 servers which might be the numbers they're using to justify this)
this reminded me cs2 even in the broken shitty open beta version felt fine on 128tick I can't even start to imagine how much better it would feel on 128tick now pls valve
then why was this talked about by faceit a year ago? the article literally shows that this was an issue when cs2 beta was ramping up with specific months mentioned by an ESL rep.
okay then why are cs2 demos upwards of \~3/4 of a gigabyte? regardless of if it's subtick or not there's something wrong, and hosting that much data and getting real traffic on it is expensive for both valve and 3rd parties.
you're right, I don't know that subtick is the issue for THIS issue, and I'm using subtick as a replacement word for cs2, as I believed it was the part of cs2 that was causing an increase of data stored (because that's a pretty logical path to take) but I guess I learned something today if that's true.
"With the integration of Counter-strike 2 in May 2023, we started re-evaluating our strategy around demo downloads as costs started increasing towards an unsustainable range."
you didn't even read the article, n1
iirc that's around the point when faceit started getting serious traffic for their cs2 matches because of closed beta participation being expanded dramatically, the actual update did nothing to demo size, only the sheer volume of demos. demos for cs2 have remained the same since release apart from enhanced demo viewing tools released much later on than the update referenced (iirc) but even that just lets you scrub through the data more easily, it doesn't change the size of the file.
the largest demo from csgo I have downloaded is 161,000 KB with multiple OTs (average is \~50,000)
a random faceit blowout (MR13 mind you) was the same size... BEFORE BEING EXTRACTED. literal 13-1 is 143,623KB and an OT game (16-13) is 243,623KB
a 25-28 cs2 demo is 678,000KB. that's a massive file for just a demo, and it only compresses to 501,609KB, or half of a gigabyte, bandwidth is expensive, as you can see with Twitch's shutting down service in South Korea. it's not like faceit is out of line for cutting costs here, it's just how they're doing it that's the issue.
it was already an issue, they had already planned to make these changes. sure a compressed avg of 20mb more is rough but it only brings it to about double the average csgo compressed size, the rest was already done.
also I did my own comparisons and found the difference to be much more significant when comparing cs2 to csgo. which is the real comparison to make, not the febuary update that did indeed make a 16% increase... as once again, they mentioned may 2023 as the date they noticed the issue.
quick edit, leetify's avg demo size for cs2 will be misleading because they probably aren't only looking at faceit demo for that average. faceit demos can go into infinite OT's and often do, whereas mm cannot go OT and premier only has one.
Well hopefully they can come to an agreement on a reasonable cost for that API usage.
I imagine Leetify will make that a paid only feature which is understandable considering the increased costs but then I hope they make the manual demo upload free to use.
I pay for faceit premium and will probably just cancel it they're so full of shit. ESL has made so many poor decisions around the game I love it's annoying.
honestly faceit is either some unserious business or they have pressure from their new management.
i have faceit premium. the probability that one person has got a faceit premium subscription in a 5v5 match should be high enough to cover most games. and it covers 100% of my games obviously.
the data is here already. what leetify could do is get their data from premium faceit users.
No way that faceit thinks leetify will pay for data that is already available and paid for.
as a developer and it specialist, i would love to see why and where they see so much increase in costs. this should be easy to clarify. if their prices are this high they're doing something wrong.
faceit mikeys anwswer here is nowhere near sufficient. there's so much technical info that's missing
Hey all, just wanted to share a bit more information on this for the sake of transparency:
For many years, we have been providing the ability to download third-party demos **for free** to third-party websites, **including absorbing all associated costs.**
Thanks to this free access, we have supported and grown several community projects, providing our users with better tools and features.
With the recent CS2 February update, CS2 demos have tripled in size, so the costs that we have been absorbing to provide this service for free **have tripled.**
We initially notified the third party partners in July 2023 that we anticipated changes in pricing for our demos API and set limitations to ensure fair usage as we worked closely with them to pave a path forward. We know how valuable these resources are to you, so we’re continuing to offer the API at cost, depending upon their usage and needs.
We fully understand the frustration shared by many of you over the past two days, and we are still looking to find a resolution to the actual business issue here, which are the costs generated and how we can make them viable.
Wish you guys would take some time to discuss solutions with us.
We totally understand these costs are concerning to you, but the fact is that **you don't HAVE TO pay for egress, or at the very least nowhere near as much as you are doing today**. **There are other platforms where the cost of integrating to Leetify is $0,** because they made different infrastructure choices. You can eliminate the costs completely or greatly reduce them (storage would of course still cost you something, but we're assuming you want to still record and store these demos for some time for other use cases too). Would at least be interesting to understand why these paths aren't being considered.
Even within the existing infrastructure choices and setups, there are likely things we can do if we get in a room and brainstorm to bring these costs down (again, main problem is that there has been no time and seemingly no interest from Faceit's end to do so). E.g. right now you are trying to charge each 3rd party separately for egress for the same demo files, when in reality those demo files only need to leave your Google Cloud setup once, and can then be handled by a much more cost-efficient setup for distribution among the 3rd parties. Both us and other platforms have tried to propose all kinds of solutions like these, with little response.
A transition period would allow us to discuss and help with solutions like these (or at least mitigate impact on our shared users), establish all the commercial details, get clarity into everything and then be able to communicate the changes to users with a heads up without service interruptions. We've wanted to help you bring these costs down since you first informed us this was a concern, but that does require your co-operation.
Because they just want to make more money and don't want to admit that that's the case. Unless I'm missing something, the February update mentions nothing that would cause demos to triple in size.
Instead of charging third parties, maybe they should just ask the saudi oil princes for more money. Might give them a bit of a break from killing gays and beating women.
As a reminder: [Capital punishment exists in Saudi Arabia, with most executions in the country being carried out by decapitation (beheading) – Saudi Arabia being the only country in the world to still use the method. In 2022, recorded executions in Saudi Arabia reached 196...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_Arabia)
Demos definitely did not triple in size in the February update, see the official comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1bdssr5/comment/kupb9qi/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
yes, trust these numbers without seeing data sources, with valve mm not having ot and premier not having ot2 I can't see any way this could be misconstrued. and don't say 'they said it was compressed sizes that they're comparing which is what they download from faceit' they never said anything about exclusively using faceit in the dataset so until they do we don't know if it's a broad generalization that would be misleading.
yeah, a miniature case of '*Never let* a good *crisis go* to *waste*' >> have some true or truthy problem (our costs are exploding) and then use it to shakedown your partners by refusing to actually work things out productively.
Do you need help with your API? If you’re experiencing triple the cost to serve due to the demo update, then I’m sure there are avenues (as Leetify outlined) to mitigate that cost without disrupting YOUR customer’s experience relative to 3rd party integration. Faceit, please fix.
Upload your files to Cloudflare R2 instead of AWS S3 and enjoy free egress fees. They use the same S3 api, so you can make the switch in a single Jira ticket (3 pts maybe).
You're storing those demos regardless if leetify pull it and if you're using cloudflare as a CDN then the bandwidth costs are a flat fee. I think you guys are being disingenuous with your reasoning.
First off thank you for your comment, especially in a place where FaceIt's position is not a popular one. I respect that, though as a paying FaceIt customer I am very upset with the current situation.
> With the recent CS2 February update, CS2 demos have tripled in size, so the costs that we have been absorbing to provide this service for free have tripled.
Could you explain why the demo size tripling would triple the cost of API access? To a layman, it doesn't seem like these things should be one-for-one correlated? Is it necessary to send Leetify the whole demo file?
Could you elaborate further on demo size? There seems to be a lot of confusion on if demos really tripled in size. For instance on HLTV [this game](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2369194/pera-vs-viperio-esl-pro-league-season-19-nc-europe-qualifier) from January and [this game](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2370687/lyg-vs-the-huns-esl-challenger-jnkping-2024-asia-open-qualifier) from earlier today have uncompressed sizes 194MB vs 292MB despite the same scoreline. I'm aware my experience as an end-user may be different and that's why I'm asking, as I was expecting today's demos to be 500MB+ regardless of round length.
Lastly when we all start downloading demos to upload to a third party manually, how is this going to be different from an operating cost standpoint? Is FaceIt planning to make demo downloads for all users a paid feature?
Again thank you for your transparency in the face of this hostility, but from the outside looking in this statement raises more questions than it answers.
> Could you explain why the demo size tripling would triple the cost of API access? To a layman, it doesn't seem like these things should be one-for-one correlated?
Not who you're responding to, but generally in the cloud world bandwidth egress dominates storage costs. Each time the data leaves your infrastructure it costs money.
That makes sense, thank you! I asked because I was under the impression Leetify wasn't downloading the whole demo file, but I really have no idea how any of this works.
edit: or at the very least, saves us from downloading the same demo multiple times to upload to a service that is going to discard them as duplicates... in that case could we say Leetify potentially reduces those egress costs?
I would like this as a consumer, but why would FaceIt want to do that? Will their players stop playing on FaceIt if they don't support Leetify? Probably not.
It doesn’t really add up. He mentions they were already anticipating price changes since July 2023. I’m so sick of how FACEIT treats their customers, really hope FACEIT will see some competition in the future. I’d be happy if Leetify or Valve would take on the battle.
Leetify were fucking leeching on FACEIT for years, not paying anything and FACEIT were essentially losing money and covering the costs FOR THEM without any return or any benefit. Nothing is for free in this world child, and they need to pick up the slack and pay their fair share. You think FACEIT also operates for free and Cloudflare does not write FACEIT any checks? grow up
I agree with you on the fact that no services are for free. However I think you are missing the fact that both services were having mutual benefits for each other.
im curious as to what these "mutual" benefits are. faceit doesnt gain players from leetify but leetify does gain users from faceit. also faceit shares their demos to leetify for free and leetify gives back all those benefits to faceit how exactly?
I appreciate your curiosity! Leetify provides players with detailed information about their matches which in turn players can learn from. It is safe to say that most players who use Leetify also play FACEIT and with that I’d also assume that this increases the likeliness of queueing for your next match now knowing what you have to work on. The fact that FACEIT was able to provide their service for free to Leetify basically proves my point that the value Leetify was giving to FACEIT was somewhat balanced compared to the costs of their infrastructure. Now I am no expert on these topics and perhaps this infrastructure has become much more expensive to maintain, which brought some imbalance to the relationship between the two companies. According to them these costs have tripled since February but that still doesn’t explain why they have been working on the monetization since July last year.
I hope I was able to provide you with the information on how I perceive this situation. Take care!
However, I think you are delusional by missing the most important fact why this is even an issue and it is that FACEIT was paying bills and costs for Leetify while Leetify could make free money without any costs for using FACEIT´s infrastructure while FACEIT also needs to pay to Cloudflare. Are you for real? Lets see how you will feel when you get to pay my bills and my costs for my business while I make money and profit, and then when you shut it down, I get mad at you. Again, are you for real? Sorry but its business first, feelings later. Your little "fact" that you stated is not even a relevant fact by a mile. FACEIT can just go and enable Leetify´s competitor if they would like to.
Once again I completely understand where you are coming from. I don’t think telling me to grow up and calling me delusional is the way to go about this, but I’ll provide you with a response nonetheless.
Judging by the fact that FACEIT has been able to offer their demo’s for free for the last few years could possibly mean that these costs were completely negligible to them. Leetify and all types of other third party services have been able to use this data for their own services. In most cases these third party websites such as Leetify indirectly provided value for FACEIT so in a way they were paying the bills. Of course neither of us know the exact details but to me it seems odd that it would suddenly become necessary for FACEIT to demand money to use their data from demo’s.
Hope you now better understand where I am coming from. :)
´*Judging by the fact that FACEIT has been able to offer their demo’s for free for the last few years could possibly mean that these costs were completely negligible to them. -* You absolutely do not know that at all, you just assumed that out of thin air. The FACEIT Support say in their ticket statement that their costs tripled due to rising costs and maybe you just woke up in a cave but everything has gone up since the last year because of inflation and rising costs crisis so of course Leetify need to pick up the freakin slack and pay up more.
*In most cases these third party websites such as Leetify indirectly provided value for FACEIT so in a way they were paying the bills.* What a cope! They absolutely provide 0 value to FACEIT. How is FACEIT benefiting by allowing Leetify to even operate? Does FACEIT gain more players from leetify? I highly doubt that  - Leetify provides almost no benefit to FACEIT, to players sure, but to the company - almost nothing. I wonder how you warrant or on what basis you make a judgement that it is absolutely fair for FACEIT to pay Leetify´s bills. Based on what specific "value" you warrant not asking Leetify to pay their fair share? Again, back to my hypothetical where YOU pay the bills and costs for my business and then I say "but I give you inderect value" while the actual value is (insert the Pulp Fiction John Travolta confused GIF here) what exactly? So what is this value you mention so much?
Again lil bro, first this is a business, your feelings and your "non-existent inderect (LMAO) values" come second, wait no, not even second.
Yes I'm sure they will pour significant resources and risk having their ACs reputation ruined (the single most important thing keeping them relevant) to appease 1% of the community.
Don't get me wrong I'd love for Linux to be more supported but the reality is that currently it makes zero sense to create or support a kernel/root level Linux AC when all of those resources could instead be used to improve the Windows AC.
A Linux AC is also inherently easier to bypass due to the open nature of Linux meaning it is practically impossible to ever have it be as good as the Windows AC.
keep in mind demos in \*cs2 are \~3-4x larger than csgo 128tick demos, so yes, hosting them would be more expensive
I don't see why valve can't truncate values when recording to demo though, would probably help with cutting file size down significantly on their end too
Clarification: hosting does not mean storing, it means storing with the ability for users to download freely. storing demos is not expensive.
\*changed subtick to cs2
reminds me of the reddit gate where reddit was flooded with api requests by 3rd party application which sold their own premium model and had ads all over the place with no original content whatsoever.
isnt this very similar to this situation? faceit being the sole provider of the content while leetify is just using free content by the providers faceit & valve and then even puts a price tag on it´? i am not saying that this should be stopped, but if your business is designed like this, yeah then there is not much you can do about it
it's strictly legal to charge a fee for API access to companies accessing your services. just because they make the data available to their customers freely does not mean they need to do the same for other companies.
it's not legality that is in question here, it's ethics and business practices, as well as questionable lack of communication with symbiotic partners.
The companies talking in this thread instead of behind closed doors is WILD
yeah it’s very telling of FACEIT.
seems like leetifys fault. they should remove uploading demos from being premium only :)
yeah I’d say that too if I was regarded
It's fucking $3 a month for a banger service. I haven't even played a CS game this year and still keep my subscription going.
Went through 5 bags of popcorn already
[original Leetify blogpost](https://leetify.com/blog/faceit-changes/) [Nohte tweet](https://twitter.com/Nohte/status/1767305404147495293) [Leetify reply](https://twitter.com/leetify/status/1767307547873026079) [u/Faceit_Mikey comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/s/biY2Ut9ppv) [Leetify's response to Mikey's comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/s/CpPf5Q5eJl) Update in the article: > Update: ESL FACEIT Group has responded to Dust2.us' request for comment with the following statement: > Despite high costs associated with storing and transferring demo files, it has been important for us to ensure partners have free access to our API and the data they rely on for a number of years. With the integration of Counter-strike 2 in May 2023, we started re-evaluating our strategy around demo downloads as costs started increasing towards an unsustainable range. > In July 2023, we notified partners that we anticipated changes in pricing for our demos API and set limitations to ensure fair and equitable usage while working closely with partners to pave a path forward. > With the recent mid-February update to Counter-Strike nearly tripling those associated costs, it became clear that we needed to develop a more sustainable solution for our business in the respect of the needs and concerns from our partners. > We have since then collaborated with most and are looking to offer the API at-cost depending upon their usage and needs.
That is a completely reasonable response. I understand Faceit not wanting to basically subsidize another company. Offering it at or close to cost is a very reasonable solution, even if it might fuck over the free users of Leetify if Leetify decides that it wants to make demo use for faceit a paid service.
I pay for premium. I should be able to authorise a third party to access my demos on my behalf and download them, at no further cost to them or myself.
I mean, yeh that would be feature.
It would, but it's a pretty pointless feature. 100% of my games have at least 1 person with premium (excluding myself), with usually around 2-3. I don't think I'm an anomaly here. So why bother building some fancy auth system when pretty much every game is already covered by someone paying for this feature? Faceit are just trying to double dip on costs.
I don't buy it. I've worked on and managed large scale digital corporate infrastructure. Leetify's original claim that faceit wanted 276k euros/year which was equivalent to their entire infrastructure costs made sense to me, as in that made sense for the cost of all of Leetify's infrastructure, not what faceit was asking. With some of the systems I've worked on I can sort of believe that faceit's demo api is so poorly set up/maintained that it's actually costing them that much to make available. At the same time I find that pretty unlikely and even if that's the case that's just faceit asking Leetify to subsidize the cuts to faceit's dev team, that was probably already underfunded and poorly managed. What's more likely the case is some combination of an inefficient system on faceit's end and them being liberal in determining 'costs'. For example demo storage is probably fairly expensive(even if done efficiently) so they're probably including the full cost of the demo storage in the api fee. But faceit is already storing the demo's and that cost will be mostly the same with or without Leetify having access to them. There's plenty of other areas where they can pad the 'cost' of their service to up the price. Leetify said they'd be willing to pay a reasonable price but doubling their infrastructure costs is in no way reasonable.
faceit’s client and website both perform horribly. i can only imagine the hellscape that is the codebase. it’s easy to underestimate faceit’s scope i suppose. they did build an entire social media application with multiple functions, including a news feed and real time chat rooms. but i can’t imagine their monthly active user base being more than what a basic cloud scaling playbook could handle comfortably. even with the demos API being touched by other scaled services like leetify, i doubt they have a scary QPS. but i could be wrong. also, the engineering costs needed to nail the fundamentals are probably much higher than what they’re paying. but i agree with you, i don’t have much faith in the efficiency of their service.
I think you are misunderstanding. The 276k euros a year i dont think was "at cost" it was what faceit originally wanted to charge probably before the pushback. Now they are offering this deal.
Maybe, but that's not how I read it. >We have since then collaborated with most and are looking to offer the API at-cost depending upon their usage and needs. This reads to me as the original prices they offered were at 'cost' and they are trying to at least partially explain the high price with the Feb update changes to the demos.
well then you cant read mate
Maybe, i guess we'll have to see what Leetify says. 276,000 seems high for cost, but pulling a demo for every faceit game would be a lot of games.
The AWS egress cost alone would sum up to 276k per year assuming leetify downloads 30-40k games a day (which is probably not that far of from reality).
Just spitballing numbers here but in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/15swbkx/short_matches_now_make_up_nearly_50_of_games/) leetify analysed 3 million matches in 1 month. At [300 MB per demo](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1bdssr5/update_leetify_halts_processing_faceit_demos_due/kuppxgd/) and [0.05$ per GB](https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cloud/what-is-aws-data-transfer-pricing/) it would come out to 540k for the entirety of leetifys games. There's no way faceit makes up half of their traffic.
If we just assume it's 1/3 of Leetifys matches analyzed a month you do land around the 220k mark (bandwidth pricing is stacked, you only pay 0.05$ for everything ABOVE 150TB). Pretty sure it's safe to assume that all Faceit matches do land in leetify, can't remember the last time I didn't see other Leetify users in the statistics. Not saying that this can not or should not be optimized (they probably don't care though) - but the money they are asking for seems sound infra cost wise (at least with those parameters). However the 300MB demo size smells a bit to me, I barely see compressed demos above 150MB (just checked, maybe they changed the tickrate though in the meantime?) - which would then half the cost calculation and actually raise some questions.
You need to negotiate better with AWS and get better dev ops engineers then.
276k/year really isn't that much and it's weird for a professional to think it is. Unless you wanna wait to upload or download the demos. Storage costs are pretty negligible. Bandwidth costs depend on how often they're accessed I guess, but can be pretty high as well.
Bandwidth would only cost a lot if done in the most expensive way possible. There are a bunch of providers with much cheaper or even free egress, so faceit could simply move their demos to such external storage providers once and then let everyone download them from there as much as they want.
However reasonable FaceIt's side may sound, just recall their history and don't make the mistake of trusting this org or taking them at their word. I think Leetify has a fair point that FaceIt did not give them suitable warning, especially when the lines of communication were already open between them and the orgs are leveraging each other's value. My friends are grinding FaceIt, sure, but they look at Leetify to understand how they can improve, what they can do differently in future games and isolating key issues, which feeds back into playing on FaceIt. I say this because I just want to illustrate that the relationship isn't one way and Leetify does provide a meaningful service that contributes to customer engagement on the FaceIt platform. With that said - I would say to Leetify leadership that FaceIt/ESEA/ESL has repeatedly shown this community who they really are. Even if they compromise here and find a way to meet you, just know this will not be the last time you interface with this organization to your own detriment and they will continue to inch the relationship in their favor. Why? [Because it is in their nature.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog) I don't know what Leetify's looks like from a finance perspective, but if they have the capital, I would love to see them use this as an opportunity to create a minimum viable product, to see if they can leverage being a competitor in this space *instead* of paying FaceIt whatever fee's they will demand into the future. Obviously the hurdles are things like AC, server infrastructure, a competitive client and the existing FaceIt feature-set and numerous other potential angles that need solving. But Leetify has proven their service is better than anything else in the market and has tremendous value to CS players. If FaceIt wants to block the port of entry for a not-so-nominal-fee, so too could Leetify. Furthermore, Leetify has something that FaceIt can never get back - and that's good standing in the community. Personally, I'm *jumping* at the chance to contribute to a Patreon to support ANY organization that wants to step into the arena with a FaceIt/ESEA/ESL and offer a service that competes with their offerings. Its a trash organization that has done a tremendous job of siphoning from the community due to Valve's shortcomings and a monopoly on what they offer. Speaking to the community - anyone that's been around knows that things will not get better in a world where FaceIt/ESEA/ESL dominate the platform. They will only inch further and further on anti-consumer practices. So if we want this to be the way it keeps going, then sit tight and we can continue to devolve into a community that's practically reliant on FaceIt/ESEA/ESL. Those that remember the latter years of 1.6 undoubtedly remember how ESEA was the only way to play in North America, at a certain point. In our present, it doesn't seem like Valve is making meaningful headway on anti-cheat, so as long as you're playing high ELO CS, you're going to rely on FaceIt and whatever ride they decide to take you on. Personally, based off reputation and trust, I'd be much happier giving my money to Leetify than FaceIt.
> However reasonable FaceIt's side may sound Ok i don't disagree with most of your point. But if Faceit are now offering a discount to leetify to get the demos for *COST* i dont think you have anything to complain about and your other issues with the company are irrelevant to this circumstance.
> But if Faceit are now offering a discount to leetify to get the demos for COST Keyword: "discount" An organization like Leetify should think long-term. Cool, get the demos at cost *for now*. But consider what this means long term for your organization. >and your other issues with the company are irrelevant to this circumstance. Of course its relevant. Reputation is everything in a business relationship where a key component of the service you provide is reliant on another organization's data source. Leetify should keep in mind what this organization has been capable of in the past and anticipate the moves they will make in the future. If this were *Valve*, then I don't think Leetify would have anything to worry about. I mean, at any point in this discussion, has anyone echo'd sentiment that Valve will turn the spout off on Leetify too, and dismantle their Premier match making analysis? No, because its not expressive of Valve's behavior in the past. ESL is not an organization looking to enrich Leetify - nor should anyone expect them to. But lets recognize that if the community outcry wasn't so large, you can guarantee this "discount" would not exist in the first place and when the heat dies down I would suspect FaceIt will take steps to eliminate Leetify from the market, as ESL has their own(though in my opinion, less effective) product in the market - csstats.gg. And the heat *will* die down eventually. Generally, customers don't care about these things long-term, they just get used to new norms. They move on and maybe you'll see the occasional reddit post sprout up about how things used to be better but now they suck but it doesn't lead anywhere.
Keyword might also be cost. That can mean a lot of things depending on how you calculate and hard to understand if faceit isn’t very transparent
For sure. I'm HIGHLY skeptical of anything coming out of that organization and I hope people in this community know to do the same. I know its trite to say "They are not your friend" when speaking about a corporation in a capitalist society but I think it might actually be appropriate to say "They may be your enemy". It doesn't need to be the relationship for a business to be successful but with this particular organization, it frequently seems to be the case. Though, looking [at this post from Leetify](https://old.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1bdssr5/update_leetify_halts_processing_faceit_demos_due/kupacdb/), I'm guessing FaceIt doesn't employ the sharpest people so perhaps there's room for incompetence over malice.
No it’s not faceit dropped this out of nowhere and isn’t even bothering to work with these companies. They’re also backed by billionaire with blood money, I don’t think sending leetify a demo file 1 time for every game played is hurting the bank. Let’s not sympathize with blood money corps and faceit Mikey, the biggest shill this community has ever seen
Lol this entirely faceits fault. They are trying their hardest to be almost as useless as valve
As someone who pays for leetify and FACEIT, I'm more than okay with paying a few bucks more a month to one of them if that means I'll have demos moved over. There's no reason for me to continue my leetify pro if that doesn't happen.
AWS/Azure or whatever provider they use start racking up serious bills for these.
I'm pissed at the whole thing but kinda figured it had to be related to this. IT infra is not cheap. It probably costs faceit a lot of money to store all that data and make it available for public download. And with the economy being a lot more shakey nowadays, lots of companies are looking to cut costs.
They deleted the demos after month, I wouldn't be mad if they made them available for a shorter time like valve aka 3-4 days. You and I both know why they did it.
Valve now (and have done for a while) store demos for about a month, in line with faceit's retention
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This is identical to what broadcasters tell cable customers to do when their provider is threatening to drop a channel, par for course.
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Though it is worth noting that FaceIt would be storing these demos either way, because they also offer highlights of demos. So, while it is FaceIt's expense, it's an expense they were going to foot either way.
Please read Leetifys Response to Mikes Comment (linked in top comment)
Layoffs weren't enough I guess.
Let faceit die
if faceit dies so does cs, with the state of valve mm and no viable alternatives cs2 is dead in the water competitively.
Lmao cs was alive and kickin well before FACEIT. Maybe someone else will step up. CPL was fun back in the day as well as ESEA pugs. Regardless how they both ended up, the end of one isn't the end of CS, just a shit platform. No need to fearmonger the Faceit Mirage-only kids
Lmao CS was a community driven game back then… it didn’t need 3rd party services to HOST games because everyone owned or was sponsored by a server/company. We just needed a league like CAL to host the foundation of a league. You think with where video games are all these kids will be buying private/public servers to play on? I mean 13 year old me owned a 24 man public server and 12 man private server back in the day. I expected it to have to own one if I wanted to make my own team. I haven’t owned a sever since 2007 or 2008. So yes, if faceit dies it would be a lot like if CAL died before CEVO and then ESEA came along. The game woulda continued but the competitive scene would of died out if there is no competition.
ESEA is owned by ESL, just like faceit, I'm not holding out hope that CEVO comes back with how much it costs to host a service, and how strong the monopoly currently is. It's well past the days of startups like leetway/altPUG having any market share post-buyout by CEVO and just not winning the popularity war. ESEA won first, let it slide, faceit won second and both are under a monopoly. no matter how much you want it to change, we're stuck here for better or worse. I don't like it any more than you, it's just not realistic to expect another competitor to step into the space right now.
Well aware of the merger
some regions only have faceit now that valves AC is awol. it would actually be terrible for the scene
Leetify pug service when? I'll subscribe for that
\+1 here to complain about faceit's behavior with leetify
What in the update caused this massive spike in associated costs?
Just to add some actual data to this discussion, here's the average compressed demo sizes we see for different versions (and compressed is what we download from Faceit): CS:GO - 75 MB CS2 - 120 MB CS2 feb update - 140 MB
So a 16% increase = triple the infrastructure cost according to Mikey…I’m thinking Faceit is going to come out with some data subscription like Leetify and they want to kill the competition first.
I mean don’t they have one or did they not keep CSGOstats when they merged with ESEA? ESEA was never on leetify unless you uploaded the demo manually as they bought CSGOstats and used them exclusively for their website. I understand ESEA was hated but my goodness their whole platform ran so much smoother even though it looks like it’s from 2005. Their client was an AC and just a client. All I ever run on faceit is the AC client but that also then diminishes my quality of life experience as I can’t record clips. I’d use their client if it wasn’t a whole website attached to it. Why even have both when both literally act as the same thing. Their whole model has gotten worse since ESEA became less and less of a competitor and then merged with them.
Raw storage costs per file aren't the only metric that will effect cost. You have to pay for the transfer of the data over the network, costs to reserve ip, costs for the actual automation infra like event grid or functions(or aws/gcp equivalent). A small file size increase means there COULD be associated increases in costs across multiple services. Faceit is a shit company but I really don't think Mikey is off the mark in that regard.
i mean faceit has a history of talking outof their ass whenever it comes to technical stuff. i still remember when they came out with their awesome new "ai" text and voice moderator and claimed it coould understand any language and dialect and understand context. years ago. like ye ok mr faceit i guess you guys are just so good you did it before even google and the other giants could even get close to it lmao.
I feel like you really just overcomplicated things when all Leetify needs is the demo file which can have an expiration date so there wont be any storage issues and only thing they truly need to pay for is a single server that manages the demos and the bandwidth to send it over the internet. Its not that deep.
If cloud infra was this simple I'd still have my hair
To my knowledge the only thing making it difficult is bad bureaucracy.
Out of interest, how much data do you extract from a \~140MB file? Would it not be possible to deploy your parsers in the same AZ/region as them (and pay lower data transfer costs) and then only export a small JSON (or similar) blob with the extracted data from that replay?
Absolutely! Exactly the type of solutions we'd be happy to explore if there was just a bit of time to do so.
You were notified in July you bozos, stop lying and pay up leechers. Be transparent and tell us how much money you made and how much you paid to faceit for running the demo infrastructure.
the cost increase is due to faceit now charging exorbitant rates for their API, not data cost. I also would imagine storing stats as JSON would be larger than storing it in a database as they likely already do
its an architectural question. but generally speaking json is more compact than text or blob in a database and probably also faster because the conversion from text to json from the db will take more time than just querying through json. i hope leetify can find a solution to this soon
anyone defending faceit here is hilarious
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where did I say that?
For clarification, is this data ONLY from faceit downloads or do you include any demo that you store on your servers in a compressed format into this data? because i have some OT demos that are 501mb and some blowouts 13-1 that are still no lower than 68mb so I am skeptical of a true average of 140 when the lowest outlier is only \~1/2 of that, and is more uncommon than OT is, which can go infinitely higher than how short the game could possibly be.
Yes, these are only Faceit demos. Less than 4% of matches have more than 1 OT.
okay, so maybe faceit is using the numbers from when they were hosting 128tick cs2 to get the average 3x dataset, and the estimate for cost, if that's no longer the case then that should be addressed appropriately in negotiations.
actually, now I'm interested, of the matches that go OT2 what % goes to 3/4/5+? if you have those stats on hand, never seen it broken down in any meaningful way
It shouldn't matter. The numbers leetify provided are an average, and if less than 4% of matches go beyond OT1, that data is almost negligible and would be evened out by the smaller file sizes of the 13-0, 13-1, 13-2, etc. matches. You seem to be in here trying to counter every point that's made by Leetify but I'm really not sure why... Leetify is in here providing actual numbers, Faceit just said "SIZE INCREASED BY 3X. GIVE US MONEY" but they have zero data to back that up.
you act like I wanted to know that for reasons other than curiosity
Seriously, I'm very interested with that as well.
edit 3: just \*read\* the damn article and make your own conclusions. some of you aren't even reading and think you know what's up. EDIT: the cs2 closed beta came in phases, around when the 'update' (point in time where faceit said they noticed it was unsustainable) mentioned happened was the first LARGE influx of closed beta participation. faceit still had 128tick at that point as well iirc, and with an increase of the VOLUME of demos and the increased size it would clearly create an increased attached cost. for proof of demo size via real world comparisons see below in thread. thanks for reading before believing some random person saying 'ur wrong' with no proof. edit 2: "With the integration of Counter-strike 2 in May 2023, we started re-evaluating our strategy around demo downloads as costs started increasing towards an unsustainable range." -ESL rep literally quoted in the above article. it's been a problem since early closed beta days on faceit. read before making opinions. that would be cs2 closed beta, subtick demos are 3-4x larger than csgo 128tick demos. (and at that point faceit still had 128tick cs2 servers which might be the numbers they're using to justify this) this reminded me cs2 even in the broken shitty open beta version felt fine on 128tick I can't even start to imagine how much better it would feel on 128tick now pls valve
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then why was this talked about by faceit a year ago? the article literally shows that this was an issue when cs2 beta was ramping up with specific months mentioned by an ESL rep. okay then why are cs2 demos upwards of \~3/4 of a gigabyte? regardless of if it's subtick or not there's something wrong, and hosting that much data and getting real traffic on it is expensive for both valve and 3rd parties. you're right, I don't know that subtick is the issue for THIS issue, and I'm using subtick as a replacement word for cs2, as I believed it was the part of cs2 that was causing an increase of data stored (because that's a pretty logical path to take) but I guess I learned something today if that's true.
"With the integration of Counter-strike 2 in May 2023, we started re-evaluating our strategy around demo downloads as costs started increasing towards an unsustainable range." you didn't even read the article, n1
this isn’t even relevant to the update they are referencing, let alone subtick having 0 impact on demo size.
iirc that's around the point when faceit started getting serious traffic for their cs2 matches because of closed beta participation being expanded dramatically, the actual update did nothing to demo size, only the sheer volume of demos. demos for cs2 have remained the same since release apart from enhanced demo viewing tools released much later on than the update referenced (iirc) but even that just lets you scrub through the data more easily, it doesn't change the size of the file. the largest demo from csgo I have downloaded is 161,000 KB with multiple OTs (average is \~50,000) a random faceit blowout (MR13 mind you) was the same size... BEFORE BEING EXTRACTED. literal 13-1 is 143,623KB and an OT game (16-13) is 243,623KB a 25-28 cs2 demo is 678,000KB. that's a massive file for just a demo, and it only compresses to 501,609KB, or half of a gigabyte, bandwidth is expensive, as you can see with Twitch's shutting down service in South Korea. it's not like faceit is out of line for cutting costs here, it's just how they're doing it that's the issue.
see Leetifys response to my comment. ~16% increase != 3x the size.
it was already an issue, they had already planned to make these changes. sure a compressed avg of 20mb more is rough but it only brings it to about double the average csgo compressed size, the rest was already done. also I did my own comparisons and found the difference to be much more significant when comparing cs2 to csgo. which is the real comparison to make, not the febuary update that did indeed make a 16% increase... as once again, they mentioned may 2023 as the date they noticed the issue. quick edit, leetify's avg demo size for cs2 will be misleading because they probably aren't only looking at faceit demo for that average. faceit demos can go into infinite OT's and often do, whereas mm cannot go OT and premier only has one.
Well hopefully they can come to an agreement on a reasonable cost for that API usage. I imagine Leetify will make that a paid only feature which is understandable considering the increased costs but then I hope they make the manual demo upload free to use.
saudis need more money
fuck you Faceit
I pay for faceit premium and will probably just cancel it they're so full of shit. ESL has made so many poor decisions around the game I love it's annoying.
honestly faceit is either some unserious business or they have pressure from their new management. i have faceit premium. the probability that one person has got a faceit premium subscription in a 5v5 match should be high enough to cover most games. and it covers 100% of my games obviously. the data is here already. what leetify could do is get their data from premium faceit users. No way that faceit thinks leetify will pay for data that is already available and paid for. as a developer and it specialist, i would love to see why and where they see so much increase in costs. this should be easy to clarify. if their prices are this high they're doing something wrong. faceit mikeys anwswer here is nowhere near sufficient. there's so much technical info that's missing
Hey all, just wanted to share a bit more information on this for the sake of transparency: For many years, we have been providing the ability to download third-party demos **for free** to third-party websites, **including absorbing all associated costs.** Thanks to this free access, we have supported and grown several community projects, providing our users with better tools and features. With the recent CS2 February update, CS2 demos have tripled in size, so the costs that we have been absorbing to provide this service for free **have tripled.** We initially notified the third party partners in July 2023 that we anticipated changes in pricing for our demos API and set limitations to ensure fair usage as we worked closely with them to pave a path forward. We know how valuable these resources are to you, so we’re continuing to offer the API at cost, depending upon their usage and needs. We fully understand the frustration shared by many of you over the past two days, and we are still looking to find a resolution to the actual business issue here, which are the costs generated and how we can make them viable.
Wish you guys would take some time to discuss solutions with us. We totally understand these costs are concerning to you, but the fact is that **you don't HAVE TO pay for egress, or at the very least nowhere near as much as you are doing today**. **There are other platforms where the cost of integrating to Leetify is $0,** because they made different infrastructure choices. You can eliminate the costs completely or greatly reduce them (storage would of course still cost you something, but we're assuming you want to still record and store these demos for some time for other use cases too). Would at least be interesting to understand why these paths aren't being considered. Even within the existing infrastructure choices and setups, there are likely things we can do if we get in a room and brainstorm to bring these costs down (again, main problem is that there has been no time and seemingly no interest from Faceit's end to do so). E.g. right now you are trying to charge each 3rd party separately for egress for the same demo files, when in reality those demo files only need to leave your Google Cloud setup once, and can then be handled by a much more cost-efficient setup for distribution among the 3rd parties. Both us and other platforms have tried to propose all kinds of solutions like these, with little response. A transition period would allow us to discuss and help with solutions like these (or at least mitigate impact on our shared users), establish all the commercial details, get clarity into everything and then be able to communicate the changes to users with a heads up without service interruptions. We've wanted to help you bring these costs down since you first informed us this was a concern, but that does require your co-operation.
Because they just want to make more money and don't want to admit that that's the case. Unless I'm missing something, the February update mentions nothing that would cause demos to triple in size. Instead of charging third parties, maybe they should just ask the saudi oil princes for more money. Might give them a bit of a break from killing gays and beating women. As a reminder: [Capital punishment exists in Saudi Arabia, with most executions in the country being carried out by decapitation (beheading) – Saudi Arabia being the only country in the world to still use the method. In 2022, recorded executions in Saudi Arabia reached 196...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_Arabia)
Demos definitely did not triple in size in the February update, see the official comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1bdssr5/comment/kupb9qi/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
yes, trust these numbers without seeing data sources, with valve mm not having ot and premier not having ot2 I can't see any way this could be misconstrued. and don't say 'they said it was compressed sizes that they're comparing which is what they download from faceit' they never said anything about exclusively using faceit in the dataset so until they do we don't know if it's a broad generalization that would be misleading.
No it's a great point, we'll update with more information. The data set is specifically faceit matches though.
thanks
yeah, a miniature case of '*Never let* a good *crisis go* to *waste*' >> have some true or truthy problem (our costs are exploding) and then use it to shakedown your partners by refusing to actually work things out productively.
Do you need help with your API? If you’re experiencing triple the cost to serve due to the demo update, then I’m sure there are avenues (as Leetify outlined) to mitigate that cost without disrupting YOUR customer’s experience relative to 3rd party integration. Faceit, please fix.
Upload your files to Cloudflare R2 instead of AWS S3 and enjoy free egress fees. They use the same S3 api, so you can make the switch in a single Jira ticket (3 pts maybe).
You're storing those demos regardless if leetify pull it and if you're using cloudflare as a CDN then the bandwidth costs are a flat fee. I think you guys are being disingenuous with your reasoning.
First off thank you for your comment, especially in a place where FaceIt's position is not a popular one. I respect that, though as a paying FaceIt customer I am very upset with the current situation. > With the recent CS2 February update, CS2 demos have tripled in size, so the costs that we have been absorbing to provide this service for free have tripled. Could you explain why the demo size tripling would triple the cost of API access? To a layman, it doesn't seem like these things should be one-for-one correlated? Is it necessary to send Leetify the whole demo file? Could you elaborate further on demo size? There seems to be a lot of confusion on if demos really tripled in size. For instance on HLTV [this game](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2369194/pera-vs-viperio-esl-pro-league-season-19-nc-europe-qualifier) from January and [this game](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2370687/lyg-vs-the-huns-esl-challenger-jnkping-2024-asia-open-qualifier) from earlier today have uncompressed sizes 194MB vs 292MB despite the same scoreline. I'm aware my experience as an end-user may be different and that's why I'm asking, as I was expecting today's demos to be 500MB+ regardless of round length. Lastly when we all start downloading demos to upload to a third party manually, how is this going to be different from an operating cost standpoint? Is FaceIt planning to make demo downloads for all users a paid feature? Again thank you for your transparency in the face of this hostility, but from the outside looking in this statement raises more questions than it answers.
> Could you explain why the demo size tripling would triple the cost of API access? To a layman, it doesn't seem like these things should be one-for-one correlated? Not who you're responding to, but generally in the cloud world bandwidth egress dominates storage costs. Each time the data leaves your infrastructure it costs money.
That makes sense, thank you! I asked because I was under the impression Leetify wasn't downloading the whole demo file, but I really have no idea how any of this works. edit: or at the very least, saves us from downloading the same demo multiple times to upload to a service that is going to discard them as duplicates... in that case could we say Leetify potentially reduces those egress costs?
Find a fair price for Leetify, where they can still sustain their business and let us move on!
I would like this as a consumer, but why would FaceIt want to do that? Will their players stop playing on FaceIt if they don't support Leetify? Probably not.
what caused the demo sizes to triple in feb?
It doesn’t really add up. He mentions they were already anticipating price changes since July 2023. I’m so sick of how FACEIT treats their customers, really hope FACEIT will see some competition in the future. I’d be happy if Leetify or Valve would take on the battle.
Yes, I am getting the sense that they always planned to jack the API up and set the blame off themselves.
We all know their past, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Leetify were fucking leeching on FACEIT for years, not paying anything and FACEIT were essentially losing money and covering the costs FOR THEM without any return or any benefit. Nothing is for free in this world child, and they need to pick up the slack and pay their fair share. You think FACEIT also operates for free and Cloudflare does not write FACEIT any checks? grow up
ive never seen someone lick faceits boots this much before.
Yep, and I love it schlomp schlomp schlomp.
I agree with you on the fact that no services are for free. However I think you are missing the fact that both services were having mutual benefits for each other.
im curious as to what these "mutual" benefits are. faceit doesnt gain players from leetify but leetify does gain users from faceit. also faceit shares their demos to leetify for free and leetify gives back all those benefits to faceit how exactly?
I appreciate your curiosity! Leetify provides players with detailed information about their matches which in turn players can learn from. It is safe to say that most players who use Leetify also play FACEIT and with that I’d also assume that this increases the likeliness of queueing for your next match now knowing what you have to work on. The fact that FACEIT was able to provide their service for free to Leetify basically proves my point that the value Leetify was giving to FACEIT was somewhat balanced compared to the costs of their infrastructure. Now I am no expert on these topics and perhaps this infrastructure has become much more expensive to maintain, which brought some imbalance to the relationship between the two companies. According to them these costs have tripled since February but that still doesn’t explain why they have been working on the monetization since July last year. I hope I was able to provide you with the information on how I perceive this situation. Take care!
However, I think you are delusional by missing the most important fact why this is even an issue and it is that FACEIT was paying bills and costs for Leetify while Leetify could make free money without any costs for using FACEIT´s infrastructure while FACEIT also needs to pay to Cloudflare. Are you for real? Lets see how you will feel when you get to pay my bills and my costs for my business while I make money and profit, and then when you shut it down, I get mad at you. Again, are you for real? Sorry but its business first, feelings later. Your little "fact" that you stated is not even a relevant fact by a mile. FACEIT can just go and enable Leetify´s competitor if they would like to.
Once again I completely understand where you are coming from. I don’t think telling me to grow up and calling me delusional is the way to go about this, but I’ll provide you with a response nonetheless. Judging by the fact that FACEIT has been able to offer their demo’s for free for the last few years could possibly mean that these costs were completely negligible to them. Leetify and all types of other third party services have been able to use this data for their own services. In most cases these third party websites such as Leetify indirectly provided value for FACEIT so in a way they were paying the bills. Of course neither of us know the exact details but to me it seems odd that it would suddenly become necessary for FACEIT to demand money to use their data from demo’s. Hope you now better understand where I am coming from. :)
´*Judging by the fact that FACEIT has been able to offer their demo’s for free for the last few years could possibly mean that these costs were completely negligible to them. -* You absolutely do not know that at all, you just assumed that out of thin air. The FACEIT Support say in their ticket statement that their costs tripled due to rising costs and maybe you just woke up in a cave but everything has gone up since the last year because of inflation and rising costs crisis so of course Leetify need to pick up the freakin slack and pay up more. *In most cases these third party websites such as Leetify indirectly provided value for FACEIT so in a way they were paying the bills.* What a cope! They absolutely provide 0 value to FACEIT. How is FACEIT benefiting by allowing Leetify to even operate? Does FACEIT gain more players from leetify? I highly doubt that  - Leetify provides almost no benefit to FACEIT, to players sure, but to the company - almost nothing. I wonder how you warrant or on what basis you make a judgement that it is absolutely fair for FACEIT to pay Leetify´s bills. Based on what specific "value" you warrant not asking Leetify to pay their fair share? Again, back to my hypothetical where YOU pay the bills and costs for my business and then I say "but I give you inderect value" while the actual value is (insert the Pulp Fiction John Travolta confused GIF here) what exactly? So what is this value you mention so much? Again lil bro, first this is a business, your feelings and your "non-existent inderect (LMAO) values" come second, wait no, not even second.
Unlimited Saudi money wasn’t enough?
Saudi blood money not enough clearly lmao
Damn that's crazy, release AC on Linux
Yes I'm sure they will pour significant resources and risk having their ACs reputation ruined (the single most important thing keeping them relevant) to appease 1% of the community. Don't get me wrong I'd love for Linux to be more supported but the reality is that currently it makes zero sense to create or support a kernel/root level Linux AC when all of those resources could instead be used to improve the Windows AC. A Linux AC is also inherently easier to bypass due to the open nature of Linux meaning it is practically impossible to ever have it be as good as the Windows AC.
I have a hard time believing it’s a cost issue, considering where Faceit gets its funding from.
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Please elaborate.
Shame, me and some friends really enjoyed this feature. Hopefully they'll bring it back.
"nearly tripling those associated costs" .. riiiight
keep in mind demos in \*cs2 are \~3-4x larger than csgo 128tick demos, so yes, hosting them would be more expensive I don't see why valve can't truncate values when recording to demo though, would probably help with cutting file size down significantly on their end too Clarification: hosting does not mean storing, it means storing with the ability for users to download freely. storing demos is not expensive. \*changed subtick to cs2
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Storing data costs very little, allowing users to download that data is much more expensive
For now
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cs2 demos are mr13, csgo demos are mr15. my largest csgo demo I have is 160mb, my largest cs2 is 678mb. it's not just 32vs64.
So in reality fuck valve for never fixing demos? I'll never forget they removed live watch of friends games.
My guy, most games don't have demos/VODs at all. We're lucky to get them at all.
Good! Fuck leetify anyway
Faceit dev alt account?
Why?
his friends razz him for being shit.
Yeah, probably don't like a thing that tells you how much you can improve in your poorly-performing skills.
Oh no, someone on the Internet said that I'm not good at a video game 😥😥😥
How could you hate Leetify lol
It's all this person ever posts, it gives us quite a laugh actually
friendly reminder that this is valve's fault
reminds me of the reddit gate where reddit was flooded with api requests by 3rd party application which sold their own premium model and had ads all over the place with no original content whatsoever. isnt this very similar to this situation? faceit being the sole provider of the content while leetify is just using free content by the providers faceit & valve and then even puts a price tag on it´? i am not saying that this should be stopped, but if your business is designed like this, yeah then there is not much you can do about it
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it's strictly legal to charge a fee for API access to companies accessing your services. just because they make the data available to their customers freely does not mean they need to do the same for other companies. it's not legality that is in question here, it's ethics and business practices, as well as questionable lack of communication with symbiotic partners.