FotM #3: ETF and TF2 veterans Coinz and Moose

G: Here is a table of LAN history that relates to you or your team at the time. Excluding ETF2L’s Community LAN, five different LAN organizations hosted Team Fortress 2 over the course of a year, from autumn 2008 to autumn 2009 (including early editions of Insomnia where records are missing). On the online side, teams are struggling to find the time to schedule officials due to the abundance of competitions: ESL Major Series, ESL regular 6on6 TF2 League, ETF2L, UKeSA, WirePlay… Feels like every organization, online or LAN alike, were giving TF2 a shot. And the team players, as well as their MGOs or esports organizations, were trying their best to attend these, to help offer top level TF2 competition, and not let the organizers down. It was a time when competitive scenes were not supported with massive budgets directly by the publishers of the games. It was rather a community effort in conjunction with MGOs and competition organizers, from what I remember and what I could understand. But there still had been competitive players in other games like Counter-Strike who could make a living out of such career since early 2000s. On the TF2 side, the amount of time and effort you could dedicate doesn’t seem small either. Players like yourselves could attend four LANs in a calendar year and play against at least three top division teams, which, Team Dignitas did in 2010.

Q4. In those years, did you feel like TF2 was onto being something more? If so, what was that “something” in your vision– a professional esport where players can quit their day jobs, or just a more recognized competitive game with higher prize pools?

Moose:
Yes, there was definitely the feeling and effort to make TF2 into a serious, professional esport. The PCGamer Showdown* was probably the first international LAN tournament for the game, and others seemed to follow with a steady pace in 2009 and 2010. I don’t know if anyone seriously thought it would be possible to make their living by playing TF2, but during this time the top organizations did pay small salaries to their players. At some point there were very ambitious plans to make UKeSA into the premium tournament circuit, where they would host major offline tournaments with large money prizes a few times a year similar to the Esports World Cup today, and TF2 was set to be one of the main games included. In the end, I believe those plans collapsed shortly after their very first tournament, which was riddled with lack of media coverage, technical issues as well as bad scheduling and other problems. Perhaps it was the lack of experience from the organization that killed the hype and the tournament didn’t gain much attention from the wider audiences. I believe UKeSA lost their main sources of funding after the pilot season and their grand plans disappeared quietly. 

The other major tournaments like ESL, Assembly and Insomnia would have probably required some support from Valve in a similar fashion as Blizzard funded their Starcraft II and later on Overwatch tournaments or Riot did for League of Legends. I myself and some others from the scene were having discussions behind the scenes with Valve in hopes of them diverting some of the cosmetic items sale revenue back to the game as LAN price money, but the company was not interested in doing that at the time. Later on, this became one of the standard sources of esports funding in other games.

The esports scene overall wasn’t what it is today. Streaming the games was rare, there were no Twich or YouTube streaming back then. Some of the earlier alternatives for these had some major technical hurdles with stream quality and stability. Most people watched the matches by joining the spectator server and watching in-game, or downloading the record file and running it in their game later. Despite this, we had a lot of people working behind the scenes trying to make the game bigger with media coverage, more LAN tournaments, more sponsors etc. But by the end of 2010, after a few years of existing as a fringe game, it was pretty clear that TF2 would never become a major esport. 

Coinz:
I always saw TF2 as just a game where I had an immense amount of fun playing and nothing more than that; I was always very disconnected from the organizations and the entire economic aspect of the game, and personally, I doubt if anyone was ever under the illusion that they could make a living off of TF2! In YoYoTech, we managed to bring together a very good team, which is why we achieved good results, and during that period, we drew a lot of attention from the TF2 community. It was at that time that we were invited to represent TCM, but our entire focus was on playing, leaving the organizational side to XMan and Byte, who did an excellent job. We always had good conditions at all the LANs we participated in.

The unfinished Crack Clan frag movie by Moose and Tuna. The kill feed proves the footage to be as early as early 2009 and/or late 2008.

G: Thank you both for sharing your unique perspectives on this. I want to ask separate follow-ups on this, but you can answer to both.

Q5.a: Coinz, why do you think it would be unrealistic to see TF2 potentially up there with the most professional esports?
Q5.b: Moose, no effort can be perfect, but do you think we as the community of players had mistakes or shortcomings that prepared the fate of competitive TF2 you mentioned?

Coinz:
Because it requires time and a combination of factors, such as: the support of a substantial initial investment with no expectation of guaranteed returns, in order to captivate a large audience that can create the necessary conditions for financial returns, thereby attracting new investors for the growth of a professional community like the one that exists today in Counter-Strike. Taking the example of Counter-Strike, which was launched in 2000 and had that investment right from the start from small investors, only in 2017 were there organizations managing to achieve total annual prize pools above $1,000,000. Considering that, on average, players receive 80% of that prize money, dividing it among the 5 players who make up the team results in $160,000 per player. This figure is very important because the career of a professional Counter-Strike player lasts at most 7 years—and we are already talking about exceptions. In other words, only in 2017, in a game launched in 2000, was it possible for an elite player to have a career that allowed them to accumulate over $1,000,000 throughout their lifespan. Now, if we combine this with the fact that the average age of top TF2 players at the time was already between 25 and 30 years old, I think my skepticism was justified.

Moose:
Well, I simply think the timing wasn’t right. Outside of getting support from Valve, maybe we could have gone to Saudi investors to get that funding like it’s done these days. But that wasn’t a thing yet back then.

I think the grass-roots efforts in Europe for TF2 were pretty strong with ETF2L, ESL and other community efforts like VanillaTF2[.org] site for TF2 content. Maybe one thing we were missing was more streaming content where more matches could have had a shoutcast included. Those were quite rare in the early days. Maybe in hindsight, some of the top level players could have tried their hand in creating commentary to make the games easier to follow. The casters we did have were coming from other games, and were only covering a selected few games, such as the grand finals for some tournaments.

continue reading in page 3…

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5 Comments

Aelkyr

Another great read !

Sep 8, 2026

Güven

It's great to see you reading here, and to hear from you again, Aelkyr. Your article on tf.tv was what gave me the motivation to write about history.

Sep 9, 2026

Byte

Such a great read, nostalgia is such a clean and authentic thing. Good to see Coinz and Moose around still and holding on to the same memories the original TF2 players had way back then.

Sep 10, 2026

june

fun to read !

Sep 10, 2026

Güven

Added another LAN photo in page 3 of the article, from i38, with Moose in it. I wasn't able to find such photo before publishing the article, and I didn't want to delay it further. Now after seeing the relevant records (on comp.tf) the photo led us to, the LAN history table in page 2 is also updated. In my search for the records, I came across this video for the first time, showing relevant footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHp6IBtqMLA Another photo contribution has come from Haunter. He states to have found the following two UKeSA photos online and saved to his album a few years ago. Due to the source being unknown now, I don't want to add them to the article without proper reference, but I uploaded them nevertheless to the links below to preserve history. https://comptf2c.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ukesa_26.jpg https://comptf2c.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ukesa_15.jpg In the first photo, from left to right: Boomeh, numlocked, Haunter, putz (manager), skinnie, Arnold, Springer.

Sep 23, 2026