Plenty of people were waiting on this one to get a first read on the top teams' form after a long break. Instead, it seems the biggest names in CS were in no rush to cut their holidays short — and promptly bombed the online stage, missing the LAN finals in Malta. Vitality, Falcons, FURIA and Aurora stayed at their bootcamps, easing back into shape at their own pace, while

Just four days ago we published "The Major No Longer Bankrolls the Scene" where — off the back of HLTV's investigation — we laid out an uncomfortable truth: once Valve buried the capsules and moved sticker sales to direct token purchases, team revenue fell off a cliff. And one of our core takes there was dead simple: Valve physically can't afford to ignore a collapse like that. It doesn't just

On July 17, Christopher Nolan released his Odyssey — a sweeping adaptation of Homer's poem with a budget pushing a quarter of a billion dollars. Even before it hit theaters, the film was buried under a mountain of discourse: some argued about the casting, others about the modern dialogue and "non-canonical" visuals, while Nolan himself coolly waved off the whole pre-release racket as "irrelevant." How it actually plays out on

HLTV has dropped a major investigation into what the Major economy has become since Valve buried the sticker capsule and moved IEM Cologne stickers over to direct, token-based sales. The findings aren't pretty: team revenue has cratered, contracts drawn up around the old model are stuck in limbo, and some organizations are seriously asking whether there's any point in treading water in this ecosystem at all. One team knocked out