It’s seems like everyone is missing the fundamental point.

Let me first say that this does not apply to every big spending org. I believe certain organizations most likely had and have had, very solid business plans from the start which have allowed them to spend a lot of money and see sustainable growth.

Now, addressing why advertising inflated salaries in a vacuum is a bad thing.

Yes, the overspending orgs with fail, sure. But in the mean time this is BAD for esports. For those of you who don’t realize yet, the future of esports and the route to the mainstream is non-endemic sponsors/investment. We are talking about elite blue-chip companies such as Burger King, Nissan etc.. coming into the space and making it viable for the increases in salaries that we are already starting to see with some players. The problem is that generally speaking, these companies are not here yet! Certainly not on a scale to support these increases at least.

To put this is perspective, if you are the marketing manager of Burger King and you know nothing about esports but you see all these heavily funded teams failing in their first year, are you going to want to invest in esports? No. People like Thorin seem to be missing this point. 2016/2017 are going to be the most crucial years for esports. This should be the years of the heavy mainstream investment in the west. However, people are getting caught up in how much players ‘deserve’ to make. The term ‘deserve’ is 100% meaningless without being contextualized.

Take Hockey for example (not Ice Hockey). Ashley Jackson is (or was at least) regarded as arguably the best player in the world. How much do you think he makes? Not very much because Hockey is not a big sport and does not have big investment. Esports on the other hand is now ‘big’ in terms of viewership and everything else but it does not yet have the big investment to match it. Don’t get me wrong, that big investment is coming, it’s just not here YET.

So now you have a situation where Orgs are jumping the gun and paying what is in the current CONTEXT, extortionate amounts of money. Would these salaries or even bigger salaries be viable and ‘fair’ down the line? Yes. But again the issue is these Orgs are setting themselves up for failure before this investment is due to really come in hard.

What a player ‘deserves’ needs this context. There is no set amount that equals fairness, you have to consider the ecosystem and where esports is now and where it will be in 1–2 years.

Publishing player salaries that contradict ACTUAL market value in the context of where 3rd party esports investment is now, is nothing but damaging. The community is unwittingly encouraging these bad business models thinking ‘good for player X, getting a nice salary!’, without realizing the bigger picture.

It’s hilarious to read/hear industry people say ‘oh so and so is just mad cause that org has money!’. None of us care about an individual org with a bad business plan that is going to fail anyway. It’s the effect that multiple orgs chucking money at esports then leaving a year later has on the sport as a whole. This has nothing to do with your TSMs or your Cloud9’s. They are spending money but growing esports at a sustainable rate.

TL,DR the VC orgs are paying in 2016 what would likely be reasonable salaries in 2017/18, which will lead orgs to die and trust to be lost from non-endemic companies causing esports to be set back drastically.