Renown is shutting down
Season 3 marks the end of our journey. Effective immediately, Renown Counter-Strike matchmaking is shutting down.
TL;DR
- Renown matchmaking is shutting down effective immediately
- Season 3 has ended early; ~€10K in skins have been distributed
- All Premium subscriptions are canceled with pro-rated refunds
- Skins, match data, demos, and the API remain accessible until Feb 28th 2026
- Thank you to everyone who played, supported, and believed in Renown
We are incredibly proud of the technology we built and the community that gathered here, but today, we have to face the hard reality.
Season 3: The final €10K drops
As we are shutting down the matchmaking, we are also bringing Season 3 to an early close.When we launched this season, we introduced the Ticket System, a way for us to reward not just grinding, but more importantly, good behavior and consistency. We promised some great skin rewards, and we are honoring that promise today.
The Season 3 draw has been completed. The total estimated value of this drop pool is close to €10,000, and we want to congratulate the winners:
- AWP | Dragon Lore (€5,600): Won by @Unfckwithable
- Karambit | Fade (€1,800): Won by @ducky
- M4A1-S | Fade (€500): Won by @Disk3n
These skins have already been sent to the winners. You can view a breakdown of the season and the final results on the Seasons page.
Why Renown is shutting down
The decision to close Renown was not made lightly. It is the hardest decision we've ever had to make as a company.To be fully transparent, Renown is currently operating at a financial loss (in the six-figure range). Running a premium matchmaking platform is expensive: high-performance servers, constant development of anti-cheat and AI systems, and the time and effort required to operate and support it all.
At its core, building a matchmaking platform is a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem: fast queues and balanced matches require a large, active player base, but players will only join and stay if those conditions already exist. While we succeeded in building the technology and the infrastructure, we weren't able to scale the user base quickly enough to escape that loop.
Practicalities: Subscriptions, skins, and data
Matchmaking is offline as of today. All other services listed below remain available until at least February 28th 2026.
Subscriptions & refunds
All affected users will receive an email confirmation of the cancellation and refund shortly. Here's the recap:
- We have automatically canceled all Premium subscriptions effective immediately. You do not need to take any action to stop future payments.
- All Premium users will receive a pro-rated refund for the unused time remaining on their current billing cycle.
- Access to Leetify Pro and SCL Individual will terminate immediately. We highly recommend checking them out directly if you wish to continue using their incredible tools; they have been amazing partners to us.
Skin drops
Please claim all your skins (including low-value ones) as soon as possible to help us close out the books.
- If you have any unclaimed skins in your Renown inventory, withdraw them from your Drops page
- The platform will be accessible for skin withdrawals until at least February 28th 2026.
Match data and demos
We want to give you time to access and archive your data.
- The website will remain accessible for you to view your match history, download demos, and review your stats.
- The Renown API will remain online for those who wish to archive larger amounts of data.
- We've added a export data button in the Settings page if you'd like to download a copy of your user data, including profile information and other data currently stored about your account.
- Access to match data, demos, API, and related services is guaranteed until at least February 28th 2026. After this date, availability may be discontinued at any time.
Renown by the numbers
Before we move to the personal reflections, we want to look at what this community achieved. Even if we didn't reach the scale we hoped for, the activity we did have was high-quality:- 20,000 matches were played on Renown servers
- RenownAI analyzed 6.5 million voice clips, 800,000 chat messages, and over 10 million game events to keep matches fair.
- 200,000 teammate ratings were submitted, helping us reward good behavior.
- We did our best to review close to 30,000 user reports (as a team of two, this was… a lot)
- 5,000 skins valued at €35,000 were dropped to users
While the platform is closing, the technology powering it remains state-of-the-art. We built proprietary systems that solved some of the hardest problems in gaming, including RenownAI for moderation, server-side anti-cheat solutions, fully automated skin drop infrastructure, inflation-resistant Elo system, and a lot more.
For commercial interest in any of the technologies, reach out to [email protected].
A personal note from the founders
I'm Adam, writing this on behalf of myself and Philip. We are the two co-founders who started this journey almost two years ago in a small office, fueled by coffee (mostly Red Bull for me) and a shared frustration with the state of Counter-Strike.We've been playing this game for over a decade. We've grown up with it. We started Renown because we believed that the community deserved better. We wanted a place where players were pre-vetted, where the anti-cheat respected your privacy but actually worked, and where toxicity wasn't just accepted as part of the culture.
I am incredibly proud of what we created. In my biased opinion, we built the best technology that has ever existed on a Counter-Strike platform.
The battle with AI perception
One of the things I'm most proud of is RenownAI. With the launch of Season 3, we rethought the approach to moderation. We moved beyond simply flagging "bad words" and started looking at the bigger picture.
RenownAI was designed to answer the questions that actually matter:
- Was Player X throwing on purpose or simply having a bad game?
- Was that team-kill a mistake or done with intent?
- Was Player Y's behavior dragging down team morale?
It worked really well. I still find myself impressed when looking at match reports, seeing how accurately the system picked up on subtle griefing that human admins would have missed without watching a full 45-minute demo.
However, even with AI, moderation at scale is a beast (and we didn't even hit some big numbers). A common critique we received was, "This doesn't work because Player X hasn't been banned yet." The reality was often that Player X was flagged. But as a team of two trying to run a business, develop features, and fix servers, we simply ran out of hours in the day to review every flagged case.
In hindsight, we probably should have trusted RenownAI more with more automated bans. But the community sentiment toward "AI" is often skeptical, and people believe "it can't work for this stuff". We were too afraid of false positives, so we bottlenecked ourselves with manual reviews.
The business of trust
Targeting the CS community is a tough challenge. There is a deep-seated lack of trust among players, born from years of neglect by other platforms. Convincing you that our approach, specifically our privacy-first, server-side anti-cheat, was viable was an uphill battle.
Our anti-cheat approach was different. We pre-vetted all players using data from Leetify, blocking thousands of accounts at the invite level before they could even play a single match. Because of this, we didn't have many rage cheaters (if any at all).
Ironically, this success worked against us. Because players didn't see "ban waves" or intrusive kernel drivers, some assumed our anti-cheat was ineffective. It's a funny paradox: if you do your job too well and the house is clean, people think the janitor is lazy. Maybe we should have let a few in just to ban them publicly. (kidding… mostly).
Limits of a two-man team
That brings me to the hardest part of this goodbye: the feeling that we just didn't have enough time.
Every piece of feedback you gave us, we heard. "We need more marketing". "We need better queue times". "We need this feature". We agreed with all of it. We had a backlog a mile long of incredible ideas that we knew would make the platform better.
We also faced the reality of marketing. People often asked: "When will you start marketing?" The honest answer is that the budget wasn't there. We had an amazing partnership with Leetify, but at the end of the day, we failed to convince enough people to switch from their default platforms and stay. We built a Ferrari, but we couldn't afford the billboards to tell people it was parked in the garage.
Closing thoughts
Shutting down feels like a failure, but looking at the matches played, the friendships formed, and the code written, it feels like a success that simply ran its course.We wanted to create a cheater-free, non-toxic competitive environment. For the thousands of matches played on Renown, that is exactly what happened. In a community often plagued by negativity, we carved out a small, wine-red corner of the internet where things were done right.
To our Premium users: You were the backbone of this project. Your subscriptions didn't just pay for servers; they told us that our vision was worth fighting for. We're sorry we couldn't take it all the way to the finish line.
To our partners at Leetify and DatHost: Thank you for believing in two guys with a big idea and helping us build a foundation that worked flawlessly at a technical level.
If I can leave you all with one final request, it is this: Let's continue to make Counter-Strike the best community in gaming. Push each other forward, even if it is now outside the Renown platform. There is enough evil and anger in the world already; we don't need to bring that into the server.
When you queue up for your next match, whether it's Premier or on another 3rd party platform, remember that there is a human behind the screen on your team. Just enjoy the game together. Rush B. Flash for your teammates. Clutch the 1v3. Enjoy it as we have for so many years.
Thank you for your time. Thank you for playing. Thank you for your feedback, your patience, and your passion.
See you on the server (somewhere else).
— Adam & Philip
Co-founders, Renown.gg