Leetify ends support for FACEIT demos after major price hike

Counter-Strike match analysis tool Leetify announced this week that it would no longer support FACEIT demos on its platform, effective immediately.

Leetify said the move came as a result of a major price hike by FACEIT, stating it faced a more than doubling of its infrastructure costs.

Leetify is a platform that enables players to upload their videos and match demos, which it analyses and then offers detailed stats, achievements and a degree of gamification. Users can compare performance to their friends and receive achievements based on in-game performance. The platform used “demos” of plays to provide its stats, which were free to retrieve via matchmaking platform FACEIT’s API.

However, FACEIT’s parent company ESL FACEIT Group has started charging third-party companies for access to its API. According to Leetify, this amounts to around $270,000 (~£212,000) per year, which would “double its infrastructure costs.” Since Leetify can’t afford this, it said new FACEIT matches would no longer be available.

The company has also pointed fingers towards ESL FACEIT Group because FACEIT “was unwilling to provide a transition period,” and claimed the company gave it “only days to react”.

But in a statement sent to Counter-Strike news site Dust2, ESL FACEIT Group claims it notified partners of the change in July 2023, and that the newest update to Counter-Strike 2 nearly tripled costs of demo downloads.

In response, Leetify confirmed that it was notified in July, but said: “EFG walked back their stance, listening to our feedback and explaining that these API changes are designed to limit misuse. They explained that they value the partnership with Leetify and our integration would be fine. They said they would keep us informed about pricing and added functionality to the API, and we followed up on this thread twice (Oct 2023 and Jan 2024) with no additional info provided by FACEIT.”

The platform went on to say that new information on pricing was not received on time, and that more than nine months had passed and EFG effectively ignored their pleas. For the time being, it seems like Leetify and EFG are stuck in a stalemate, with Leetify’s users no longer able to analyse FACEIT match demos.