Gankstars celebrating win in VIPL 1, September 2015.

Gankstars was born in Vainglory in early 2015 and it’s where we made not just our fame, but also our income. By early 2016, however, this changed and we’ve been putting more into the game than making from it. I didn’t mind — Vainglory is home and we always believed in the game and the game developer.

Instead of taking all of our profits and investing them into expansion, we reinvested the vast majority of our funds back into Vainglory. More than $150,000 of it, just about all of it going to competitive salaries. Vainglory was our home, and we wanted to prioritize a home game before spending elsewhere.

When I got the email recently about Gankstars not being allowed into the 2018 franchise program, we decided we could no longer justify this expense. For a game of its size, Vainglory is very expensive to compete in. During this critical time in esports, we have to be very purposeful about budget allocation lest we miss out on some critical opportunities.

We had an amazing time in Vainglory so far. It’s hard to argue with the fact that Gankstars is the poster child of Vainglory’s grassroots. If you zoom in on esports only, LibX comes to mind as well — the winner of Vainglory’s first-ever non-Korean live event. Hammers are close runner-ups, IMHO, and I at least hope they made it into this year’s program.

Gankstars and LiberationX at Autumn 2015 Live Finals.

Speaking of LibX — 2018 Gankstars VG team was going to include both Martohh and Exhail, two original members from LibX. Cull was a maybe. MackDaddyB was to be the 4th. I’m sorry that we don’t get to debut this amazing roster for you all.

Vainglory wasn’t just any game to us, of course — it was our genesis. We attended more live events in Vainglory than any other org. (FlashX holds a tie, I think, just not under the same org). I felt like we couldn’t depart without leaving our fans with something special.

So today, I am unsealing some of our history, things only a few people knew about. There’s more to tell than a single blog post can hold; I hope you enjoy this selection of stories. For a few more, subscribe to Brad Chmielewsky’s Shatter the Vain podcast and catch me on its 200th episode, which will air in a few weeks.

Vainglory Deserves Success

Myself and IraqiZorro at SEMC studio during a Dev stream.

I hope this post isn’t misconstrued for anything other than an opinion piece and sharing of our history. I wish Vainglory all the best, truly; half of our staff found Gankstars through VG. Too many people have put in too many hours of blood and sweat into this game for me to wish it anything but the biggest success. And at the core of it, Vainglory has great potential.

I have tremendous respect for many people at SEMC. So many smart people work there. I’ve worked with people in esports who would go bananas over a business disagreement and then try to publicly diminish and hurt the other party; that’s not me. The decision by SEMC to not extend our franchise contract (and some others’) is a business decision, and while I do not understand it given Gankstars history, presence, and deliverables, it doesn’t change my opinion of the great people at the company. A franchise is a privilege, not a right. This year, someone else gets that privilege. I’m sure SEMC has a good reason for it.

Alright, grab a snack and get comfortable — we have a long story ahead of us.

Esports

SEMC founders holding up signs to cheer on Gankstars players during our match.

We’ve said multiple times that Gankstars believed in increasing the size of the entire pie instead of just fighting for a piece of it. The larger the pie grew, the larger our piece would be — a simple philosophy. So for Gankstars to really win long-term and not just short-term, we had to do all we could to help everyone else win, too.

Few know about how committed we were to putting our money where our mouths were.

VIPL

Vainglory fans lining up to see Invincible Armada, Gankstars, and other teams play at VIPL.

After winning the first VIPL in Seoul, we secured a great sponsorship by Mobcrush. We immediately put this money and political pull to use. When I heard that FlashX’s team (Ardent, NA) didn’t have a way to afford a trip to season 2 of VIPL, I convinced Mobcrush to sponsor them. Mobcrush declined at first, not knowing much about Ardent yet and understandably not wanting to sponsor 2 teams in a new game. I persisted until they changed their mind. As you remember, Ardent ended up beating us at VIPL 2. We literally ended up sacrificing our own 2nd title and prize pool money for the good of the community. We helped Ardent despite the fact that I removed FlashX from Gankstars a few months prior over a disagreement. Being a co-founder is like being married: you will only find a match with a few people in the world. However, you can have a professional relationship with almost anyone in the world, and it’s almost always beneficial to return to that relationship once you’re no longer co-founders. To be clear, all credit for winning goes to Ardent — they practiced hella hard. I saw it first-hand because we shared an apartment together. Here’s a letter from FlashX acknowledging the assist.

If only Iraqi wore shorts that day, we’d stand a chance…

R3D (EU), the team that later became SK Gaming, also had trouble affording a VIPL trip. So we lent them money to ensure they could attend. SK Gaming refused to repay the loan after R3D was acquired, so it became a gift. That’s fine, as it wasn’t SK Gaming who agreed to it. In fact, we’re good friends with SK Gaming today. Here’s letter from MYQ (then-captain of R3D, now SK Gaming’s Head of Mobile) confirming our assistance.

Gankstars (NA), R3D (EU), and Hunters (China) in Seoul, Korea. August 28, 2015

Infamous (SEA) had the money, but couldn’t pay for the apartment due to some weird issue with a credit card. So we paid the apartment cost for them, agreeing that they would use an ATM in Seoul to pay us back $300–500 at a time every week, which they did. We’re friends with these guys to this day and they made the tournaments more fun for everyone else involved. Here’s the letter from RJ, leader of Infamous at the time and now tournament manager at Tesseract Esports (which had been running Vainglory 8 in SEA for the past year).

MonteCristo with Brendan Valdes treating Ardent and Gankstars to some Korean hospitality.

One of my favorite teams in Vainglory is Hunters. QUEEN and I hit it off as friends right away; I have so much respect for her. After Hunters had lost to us in one of VIPLs, her and Godfather met with me to discuss quitting Vainglory. QUEEN was disheartened by the loss and wasn’t sure if she could run her team well enough to make it a success, especially in a new title that was facing so many challenges in China. I told her that she is amazing, she got this, and that she is welcome to copy anything and everything GS does if she finds it useful and thinks it can work in China. I assume she had conversations with other people, too. QUEEN decided to stay in Vainglory (although a year later she passed on leadership of the team to someone else and got involved with Vainglory tournaments instead) and Hunters are to this day one of, if not the best team in China. QUEEN’s letter about our friendship is here.

Seeing “Gankstars vs TSM” on broadcast for the 1st time was surreal, so I kept a screenshot.

Miscellaneous

More publicly known is the fact that Gankstars served as the launch pad for many of today’s top players. IraqiZorro, CullTheMeek, and gabevizzle are the trio everyone knows about. What fewer people know is that iLoveJoseph learned petal, many soft skills, and how to troll less from Chino’s coaching while at Gankstars. FooJee was considering quitting VG and focusing elsewhere before we offered him to join GS in 2015; after that offer, he decided to give this another shot. R3cKeD was always capable; and, I feel it’s fair to say that he really grew into the amazing roamer we know him for today while under IraqiZorro’s leadership. (Shout out to Iraqi for generally making a ton of positive contributions to Vainglory.) We were the first to recognize XenoTek’s talent and invite him in; though our first adventure with him didn’t work out, it was a part of growth that helped Xeno become the competitor he is today (and why he ended up coming back to GS for 2017).

MJ, America’s next greatest salesman.

We were also fortunate enough to have many firsts. Gankstars was the first to pay players enough for them to afford to stay in Vainglory full-time. We were the first to introduce real, player-friendly contracts. The first to publicize our prize pool earnings and distributions. The first to recruit and train analysts and start publishing some of the findings so that others could benefit from it. The first grassroots org to have a Vainglory team house (TSM was the first overall). The first and only org to bring not one, but two teams to a World Championship (shoutout to Cerberus). Lastly, we were the only org to bring NA strats to EU, helping the region grow competitively in a small way (NA > EU ❤).