This week’s news that BIG is leaving women’s CS might seem like par for the course to you. For years now - long before ESL hit the killswitch on their Impact project - big orgs have been exiting women’s CS in droves.

In actuality, it marks a very depressing low point in Counter-Strike’s history. As of Friday, every single European organisation that ever invested in the Impact League has exited women’s CS.

We’re at rock bottom.

BIG held out the longest. Despite seeing big success early on, NAVI and G2 left well before the shutdown was even announced. NIP held out for a while, but killed the project along with the league itself. Teams like Spirit, VP and GL left after barely giving the project a chance, and Astralis… well, in their case, they had bigger fish to fry.

The German organisation were one of the first teams to join the league, and despite (ironically) not being as big as some of the aforementioned teams, they held out the longest, in spite of waning financial incentives.

We know that it has meant the world to those players. The championship-winning roster they put together for the final season in 2025 brought a glimmer of hope to the scene as a whole, and BIG set a standard for how to support, promote, and celebrate these players - those who need it the most.

We can’t do anything other than raise our glasses to them for that effort. It looks grim right now - funnily enough, European players looking for a full-time team right now are better off moving to North or South America, but we still have hope that the scene can grow to where it deserves to be.

To all the rest of you, who let their teams go with an off-hand tweet, you should be f-cking ashamed.

Thank you, BIG.