We weren't getting a lot of player retention. 'They were kind of disappointed with the numbers we were getting. 'We were publishing in North America with a publisher that was mainly geared towards casual games,' Le says when I meet him just before his talk. Tactical Intervention launched in March this year, and its servers were closed in June. Indeed, Le moved to South Korea from his native Canada in 2008 to secure funding from a local publisher called OGPlanet - a considerable personal sacrifice for Le, and one that didn't pay off as he had hoped. Not just because of the huge success of his 1999 Half-Life mod, but because of the ambiguous fortunes of his latest project: Tactical Intervention, an online FPS five years in the making. Le is attending Barcelona's Gamelab conference to speak about the challenges facing contemporary developers working with multiplayer shooters, and he is uniquely placed to comment. 'A lot of players were really turned off by the fact that Tactical Intervention wasn't on Steam. As the co-creator of Counter Strike, Le was responsible for one of the biggest evolutionary leaps in the industry's most popular genre a game important as Quake or Half-Life to the development of the modern first-person shooter, and an important milestone for the growing popularity of e-sports. Fame and influence don't always go hand-in-hand, and Minh Le is walking, talking proof of that fact.

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