Esports Teams Unionize Amid a Collapsing Market

As cuts, austerity, and mismanagement sweep across the esports landscape, players associations and community events are stepping up to fill in the spaces left by retreating corporations. 

Despite challenges in other games, the future couldn't look much brighter for Street Fighter, which is leading the charge for esports with an internet breaking 2 million USD on the line at the next Capcom Cup world championship. While the director of Street Fighter 6 has stated that his goal is to move past just winners and losers, prize structures for major tournaments are only widening the gap between haves and have nots.

Nowhere is this divide better exemplified than in EVO, North America's premiere fighting game tournament, which has announced massive changes to prize pools, bringing the prize pool for each main stage game up to at least $25,000 - but at the same time, the prize pool has been constricted to only paying the top six players in each event, rather than the traditional top eight, leaving even top players wondering if competing in the tournament will remain financially viable.

Echoing those concerns is Tokido, a former EVO champ who stated in a recent interview that "even players who are currently making a living from esports have a lot of troubles." To deal with those troubles, Tokido and a group of fellow competitors in Japan's official Street Fighter League have come together to form a player's association, the first of its kind in Street Fighter esports. 

On February 9th of this year, a group of players from the Japanese Street Fighter League, including previous champions such as Kawano and Tokido, announced the formation of a Street Fighter Player's Association to work with the Japanese Esports Union and Capcom to reform the Street Fighter League. One of their main complaints is a grueling schedule, which often includes multiple competitions, streams, and media events every week, placing demands on players to constantly travel and make appearances on top of their need to train for many hours to stay at the top of their field.

Aside from EVO and the Street Fighter League, the premiere suite of top tier tournaments in Fighting Games seem to be in jeopardy. Organizations like Panda Global, The Smash World Tour, and Beyond the Summit, former mainstays of the Super Smash Brothers competitive circuit, have recently folded in the wake of drama and legal difficulties. In their place, smaller events are filling the void, such as The Coinbox, a Super Smash Brothers tournament with thousands of dollars on the line every week, backed by crypto money and SSBM legend Hungrybox.

Similarly, Starcraft players are moving to community run events like the Korean Starcraft League in the wake of major slashes to prize pools for the largest events, which some have called "the End of Starcraft 2 Esports." As part of Blizzard's many recent troubles, the prize pool for the ESL prize pool has been cut in half, down to 600,000USD compared to last year's pool of over 1.3 million USD, with similar cuts hitting Hearthstone E-Sports, as part of a cost cutting effort by Blizzard to save its struggling esports offerings.

Regardless of which title or genre you look at, labor disputes and contract issues are the hot topic anywhere in e-sports. In the world of Counter Strike, a group of teams have come together in a profit sharing initiative called the World Esports Association to stabilize the ecosystem ahead of Counter Strike 2, in the midst of disputes over unpaid wages and the collapse of major organizations such as Faze Clan.

Meanwhile in League of Legends, even with a stable, popular league and a well established player's association, labor issues are only becoming more and more inflamed, as in the high profile case of Danny, a player for Evil Geniuses, who recently retired and then un-retired in the middle of an otherwise dominant season. According to a landmark report by Dexerto, Evil Geniuses management was pressuring Danny to continue play despite a growing raft of psychological and medical issues that left him malnourished and severely anxious, sparking contentious back and forth among journalists and spectators about the state of the industry. The sustained controversy has finally prompted Riot Games to open an investigation into the matter, coincidentally announced days after the Dexerto report shed light on the situation.

With working conditions growing more strenuous as the public spotlight on esports grows, grassroots organizing promises stability and sustainability for the players that make competition so thrilling to watch. We've come a long way from LAN parties and MLG, but there's a long way left to go for competitive video gaming to catch up with established sports leagues.