‘Chiu on This’ is a short and regular opinion blast

In the last few months, it has come out that some of the contenders teams haven’t paid their players. The two most prominent examples we know of are EnVision and Eagles. Roflgator tweeted about the EnVision situation a few days ago.

Update on Envision payment:

its been over 50 days since the 30-45 days promised late payment

5 months since I shouldve been payed.

Still havn't gotten paid. — roflgator (@roflgatorOW) October 8, 2018

KnOxXx revealed the Eagles problems in his twitlonger, which was translated by invenglobal.

This is terrible, but sadly all too common in burgeoning esports scenes. As Overwatch League has been tightly constructed since it’s inception, the responsibility of these issues does lay with Blizzard. In this particular case, I think it is the lack of endemic esports teams in the scenes that has caused it to happen.

I’ll take Contenders Season 2 as an example. There were seven different regions in the Contenders scene for a total of 86 different teams. Among all of those and discounting academy teams, I recognize ten of the teams that could be labeled “endemic”: Pain, Order, Legacy, Tainted Minds, LGD, Winstrike, Kongdoo, MVP, Hong Kong Attitude, and Machi Esports.

Among those ten teams, the only tier 1 endemic team is LGD. The rest are middling or names that I barely recognize and know little about. For context the games I have followed in esports include: Brood War, SC2, League of Legends, Dota2, CS:GO, Street Fighter, Melee and Overwatch. To clarify even further, I define an endemic team is an organization that has had multiple years of experience throughout its tenure and has had success in one game or multiple game across a variety of different levels: results, player treatment, sponsorships, etc.

For me, tier one and tier two endemic esports teams have consistently been able to fulfill their side of the contract and there are rarely payment issues between the org and player (though there can be). The reason they are is because they have enough experience and knowledge of the esports scene to know if something is worth investing into or not. Eight months ago I wrote an article explaining how there was no legitimate reason for any good organization to invest into the Contenders scene because you get neither money nor glory as a team.

I still think it applies given that none of the endemic orgs have increased their participation in the Contenders scene and the two endemic orgs that did join OWL (Splyce and Luminosity) joined the actual franchise system rather than getting a contenders team. Without endemic orgs, there is a vacuum of space where a bunch of newly created orgs have been put in place. In some cases you have outright maliciousness where these new teams try to exploit the players for a potential payday or you have incompetence where new teams and owners don’t realize how hard it is to survive in the esports space as a team, especially in contenders.

Until Blizzard fixes the Contenders system so that it is an actual viable space for legitimate teams to make money, I think this issue will keep continuing. As for legal recourse, none of the amounts I’ve seen stated make it cost effective for anyone to actually go to court to battle for.

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