Enjoy playing
Counter-Strike again.

We are launching Renown to solve three issues we see as existential threats to Counter-Strike, the game we love and have played for the last 2 decades:

1. The CS ecosystem is not healthy. Existing 3rd party platforms are owned by people who don’t care about our game, more focused on protecting their own monopoly than contributing value to the community.
2. Cheaters are ruining the game experience for many people, and we want to take responsibility and do what we can to combat this threat.
3. Competitive games are becoming increasingly toxic. We think there are bold new ways to reverse these trends and make everyone’s match experience much, much more enjoyable.

Renown is built and owned in Scandinavia, started as a separate company by some of the passionate CS players that brought you Leetify and DatHost. We are starting this movement, but we seek the broad participation of all parts of the community, from the average player, to professionals, influencers and other companies. For example, we hope to take on a few people who we think are role models for this community as co-owners so they can help guide the direction of the platform. Please reach out if you want to be part of this in some way.

We don’t plan to take in venture capital. We made this decision so that we can have full control over this company’s destiny and build a benign entity in the CS space. We don’t want to be beholden to dangerous return requirements of VC funds or anything else that means we’d be forced to make decisions that aren’t in the best interest of players.

Another reason we’ve chosen to forego VC funding is that no outside party can dilute our focus. Our goal is to stay focused on Counter-Strike, and only Counter-Strike.

Renown will not offer a free tier and will be a fully premium experience. This may seem controversial, but we actually think this is one of the biggest strengths of the platform for a number of reasons:

• Keep cheaters out.
• Your teammates will care just as much about CS as you do. We aren’t looking to cater to everyone here, we want to deliver a focused experience with high-quality CS.
• Our revenue directly comes from you as a user. This allows us to focus 100% on delivering the best experience for you. We want the players to be our main stakeholders, not venture capitalists or other businesses.
• It means we can invest in better moderation and support for our players, so we can enforce a no-toxicity rule.
• We can invest in building the best possible anti-cheat solution.

On the anti-cheat side, we plan to invest in multiple anti-cheat solutions.

• Demo and AI-based AC
  We see that the data we gather at Leetify can already be valuable in detecting cheaters if used responsibly. We plan to invest further in gathering data from demos that can be specifically used to counter cheaters. Additionally, through Leetify we will already have a huge amount of historical data on any new players coming to the platform that we can use to ensure their integrity.
• Client side
  Renown will have a great proprietary client-side anti-cheat which still respects your privacy.
• Humans
  Humans can still be very effective at detecting cheaters. We plan to both have paid team members whose only job is to help catch cheaters, but also incentivize the community to contribute in catching cheaters. Of course, this will be done in a thorough manner which ensures there are no false positives.

No free tier means we can invest much more in community moderation. We will be both leveraging AI-solutions for moderating player behavior as well as having paid team members who focus exclusively on making sure everyone is playing nice.

We will design comprehensive systems that promote and reward good user behavior, and think some of the work Valve recently did in DOTA2 can serve as a good inspiration here. We think that deep down, we all want a nice experience when playing games online, but we understand that the stresses of competitive games can sometimes make us act in ways we're not proud of. By clearly stating our intent to not tolerate this behavior, it'll be easier for all of us to be the best version of ourselves.

Renown will start inviting users to our platform later in 2024. Sign up to the waitlist to get the chance to be one of the first players on Renown and to help shape the future of CS.

This journey starts here. We have no illusions that this journey will be an easy one, and the incumbents have a big head start on us. However, we are no strangers to tough challenges and we will be working hard to bring a new platform that will make your CS matchmaking experience monumentally better.

This work has already started, but we still need some time before we’re ready to fully unveil and let you all loose on the server. We plan to build Renown with the same transparency and user obsession that have guided our decisions at Leetify & DatHost, so expect updates from us as we build.

Join our Discord server now to start giving your thoughts on how we can build the best experience possible for you.

Also follow Renown on Twitter, where we will share updates on the product development as well as career opportunities.