Hello. I’ve made the difficult decision to begin the process of winding down (most of) GFL. This has been caused by a variety of circumstances, including:
- A decline in popularity of our servers. Our main divisions have been slowly diminishing since GFL’s earlier days, but up until recently this wasn’t as big of a deal as CS:GO could more than make up for it. Unfortunately, with Valve releasing CS2 and hurting the CS:GO division, our revenue dropped substantially.
- Failure to pivot. Despite our revenue falling substantially, our expenses didn’t. In fact, some providers even increased prices citing inflation. While we have been aware that there was a problem for some time, due to a combination of optimism regarding CS2’s ability to pick up where CS:GO left off and a failure to implement measures to reduce our expenses quickly enough, our bank account’s balance has deteriorated over the last few months. While we did indeed take some cost cutting measures earlier this year, they did not end up being sufficient. More substantial changes were needed and key individuals capable of planning and implementing them were unavailable due to outside obligations.
- Inability to find a new owner. I’ve had the idea of passing on ownership of the community and departing floating around in my head for some time as I have had neither the time nor motivation to work on GFL. I asked a few individuals who I trust whether they’d be willing to take on the community. Due to the substantial amount of work involved in bringing GFL back to being sustainable (among other factors), none of the individuals I spoke with were willing to take the community in its entirety due to risk that entails. As I really do not want to be doing this any longer, I am left with the option of either partially or entirely shutting down the community.
In line with this, the majority of GFL’s servers and services will stop operating on or before July 21. I’m sorry I cannot offer a more specific timeline, but I will try to keep things operational until cancellation dates make doing so no longer feasible. That said, some servers will continue to operate under new ownership.
CS2 Zombie Escape
Despite the overall decline of the community, Zombie Escape has remained strong thanks to the continued efforts of Vauff, Snowy, the server’s staff team, and the community. I think it’d be unfortunate for ZE to go down with the ship, so I’ve spoken with Vauff and will be handing off ownership of CS2 Zombie Escape server, the gflclan.com web domain, and most of the community’s remaining funds to Vauff (the rest of the money will be used to settle any obligations I have incurred on GFL’s behalf, such as outstanding invoices from service providers). This change will be happening over the next week or two and there may be some downtime associated with moving things over. Vauff will be releasing his own announcement with further details.
CS:GO Surf and Surf Private Servers
While the public CS:GO Surf servers have been hurt substantially by CS2, Infra is interested in potentially spinning the subdivision off into its own entity, so GFL Surf will continue to operate in some form and private server services will continue. I will give Infra some money that would have otherwise been paid out to private server clients as a refund for early termination of the service. I will also give Infra ownership of the Surf Discord.
Physion Unturned
A while ago GFL purchased another community, Physion. Since purchasing it, Salad has acted as the community manager of Physion. Salad is interested in continuing to run Physion independently. To facilitate this, I will be giving Salad the physion.gg domain name and the Physion Discord.
Other Divisions
Various staff members have expressed that they would be interested in continuing to run their servers at their own expense. I am happy to facilitate this by giving them access to any server files they may need (excluding anything with restrictive licenses, e.g. GMODStore addons). I am also willing to consider on a case by case basis transferring ownership of divisional Discords to interested staff members. Any staff members interested may contact me on Discord to discuss.
Acknowledgement
Throughout GFL’s history, it’s been somewhat of a tradition to tag a bunch of members who had a significant impact on your time in the community in resignation / departure threads. While I was initially tempted to do the same in this post, the reality is that there are simply too many people who played in a role in building GFL and I don’t want to run the risk of leaving anybody out (that said, if you have anybody you feel had a positive influence on your time in the community, give them a shout out in the replies!). So instead I’d like to thank all of the staff and community members who played a role in making GFL special to myself and so many others. I’d also like to thank Christian (Roy). Despite the admittedly rough break-up, literally none of this would’ve been possible without him and I wish him the best.