why most new games fail while Counter-Strike is still so popular

  The first time i played Counter-Strike i was in high-school and the game was still a unofficial Half-Life modification, at that time it was closer to a quake-like game with modern weapons then what it is now, but i will leave that for another topic.

History
  For those that don't know what Counter-Strike is, it's a First Person Shooter developed by a fellow player made from a game called Half-life that is why it was a "modification",  i use the past tense because once Valve saw the amount of people playing it, they bought the rights to the game and thus it became an official mod soon after and it became a stand-alone game later on.

The popularity
  The game popularity and success can be resumed into 1 word, "community" it's a bit vague yes but i will explain it in further detail later on , first we need to understand that this game was developed by a player meaning he knew what he wanted to play, i think its something most game developers have lost now-a-days they just build games around a franchise with 1 concept "making money", this reason is why most Indie(small companies) games are so entertaining to play, because it's not million dollar company with people who don't know a thing about gaming breathing down your neck.

ESL tournament at GamesCom

  Anyway Counter-Strike was made with an aspect in mind "for everyone", even back then you didn't need a top of the line PC to play it so most kids with a computer and a copy of Half-Life could play it, and keep in mind that back then internet was still the noisy old 54k modems and it was not that common, so most of us used to spend a lot of time playing in game store with about 20 PC linked over LAN, honestly the most fun way to play any game is to physically be with your team just like in most LAN tournaments which if you are a true gamer you have already gone to some, if not i recommend that you go if you have the chance you will love it.

  The rules of the game are very straight forward, team A vs team B fight inside a small closed map, just imagine an arena with streets and tunnels, many games have this even MMORPGs so why is the game still one of the most popular FPS games for over a decade?

  Well this is where the community comes in, as the number of players grown they started to make teams in which to compete with each other for bragging rights and so player-made competitive PvP was created and started to spread, since making a server was free players would make their own server so they could train with their team adding tactics into the game, eventually some companies started to provide high quality server for rent and now-a-days its fairly common to see game-server rentals for many types of games.

So what is missing in games today?
  This is more of a formula rather then just one thing, first games need to be able to be played by a large audience so they need to keep the game optimised for low-end computers rather then just focus on how awesome it can get with a top of the line one which seems to be what most games do, some people might upgrade the computer if they are really into it but most can't afford to do it.

MLG tournament

  Second is taking advantage of tournaments, people are competitive by nature even caveman would compete for the largest prey to show who was the best hunter, we are not that different as even the PvE players like to kick another players ass every now and then. So just like a great deal of people like to sit in front of the TV looking at whatever competitive sport they like(football, basketball, baseball...), we players also like to see competitions online as it is a sport of its own plus its probably the best publicity one can get specially at large events such as E3, GamesCom, etc...


  The third one is mainly for MMORPGs but some shooters still fail at it, is to allow players to fight guild vs guild(clan vs clan) for bragging rights, and im not talking about just Arena type gameplay like WoW has but for all types of objective based PvP.
  In the begining of this year a shooter named Global Agenda was released and it did not have a way for players to effectively do this and the results was the game losing most of its player-base within the first 2 months.

  A game that follows these simple rules will most likely last for years assuming there isn't something deeply wrong with it to start with, which is one of the reason i am looking forward to Guild Wars 2.

What are your thoughts on the subject?
Do you know any game that failed due to this?

Leave your comments or experiences bellow!