From media laughingstock to media craze, from thousands of viewers to millions.
Welcome to the Season 3 World Championship Finals!
esports in the last decade or so has eclipsed all expectations.
Never before in the history of dota have we had a prize pool of this magnitude
twenty million seven hundred thousand plus extra change.
Now, the industry is set to further mature with the announcement of Blizzards Overwatch League
and Riots NA LCS shifting to a franchise model.
We're going to be sharing revenue with teams and pros,
we're going to be establishing a players association to support and protect pros.
But while esports has come a long way since its humble beginnings
it hasn't been without its set of controversies.
I will make sure you will lose the house.
That's...that's a promise.
They did cheat.
I just want to apologized to MLG and the fans and Riot.
What is he doing?
They just run in there to die!
and we found this new site called CSGO Lotto.
From the NFL's deflategate and head trauma controversies to the MLB's doping scandals
and match-fixing that dates back to 1919,
one thing is pretty clear when it comes to
professional sports, sometimes the spirit of competition gets lost in the money and fame.
And esports is no exception.
Back in 2009, esports was at best a buzzword in the west.
But on the other side of the world, the industry was already an established hub of opportunity.
You need to see this.
With the rise of Starcraft's popularity in Korea, a significant number of illegal
gambling websites sprung up as a way for people to capitalize on the number of
yearly competitions that took place within the country.
By 2010, several brokers representing these sites
used their connection with the pro league circuit
to entice players to throw matches.
The money involved made it an
easy sell and more than ten players including some of the game's most
prominent members, like CJ Entus' sAviOr and STX Soul's Hwasin participated in the scandal.
The scandal turned the esports world upside down. Even the mainstream media who had little
to no interest in esports in 2010 wrote about the scandal comparing it to the
1919 Black Sox scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox
baseball team were found to have deliberately lost games.
By 2011, a new title
League of Legends was gaining popularity, especially in the West.
reaching a hundred and eighty eight thousand viewers on our stream
it's ridiculous! That..I..we were expecting something like that for the grand finals maybe.
But much like its RTS predecessor, the games growth
meant that its integrity would be put to the test. Then, in 2012, League of Legends
experienced its first major scandal.
Team Curse here and we just want to apologize to MLG and the fans.
Team Dignitas and Team Curse NA
privately agreed to play out the first match as an All Random All Mid
ahead of the MLG Summer Championships grand finals and their collusion cost
them forty thousand dollars in winnings.
The interesting thing about this is that
Dignitas has their seating relied on this game, if they win this series they'd
move into second place and face a different team in the first round they'd
dodged out of Team Dynamic.
What is going on?!
In the same year, during the World Championships,
a critical design flaw with the stage allowed players who
looked up at the venue's main screen to catch glimpses of the enemy's mini-map.
The screens are behind the players. So, there's always a chance of cheating.
Though the accusations initially began online,
Riot's internal investigation found that five instances
of the players looking up at the jumbotron took place. The most severe of
which occurred during a match between Korea's Azubu Frost and the North
America's Team SoloMid.
Woong, the AD carry for Azubu Frost was caught looking
at the venue screen and the team subsequently modified their gameplay
based on the information gathered. Effectively nullifying TSM's level one strategy.
The first game was kind of disappointing to me mainly because they did cheat.
Though some people questioned exactly how advantageous the screen
watching was, the community was furious and esports' integrity was once again under the microscope
In 2013, esports as a whole took a giant leap forward.
League of Legends hosted the most viewed esports event of the year,
with 32 million unique viewers, an exponential growth from 2012's
8.2 million. And Dota 2's The International tournament handed out over 2.8 million dollars in prize money.
But as the scene attracted more views and higher payouts,
it also attracted more people.
Some of which did not have the industry's best interests at heart.
In 2013, Alexei "Solo" Berezin famously threw a dota 2 match for 322 dollars
They just run in there to die!
and a rogue employee at ESEA uploaded malware
into the company's software allowing him to farm bitcoins
unbeknownst to the software's users. The malware initially began as an experiment
run by ESEA on two of their own admins computers for the purposes of testing
Bitcoin integration for their clients, but the company eventually decided to
scrap the project. Though the project was scrapped, one of the employees involved
in the beta tests decided to use the code to mine bitcoins for personal gain.
That's..that's unreal. Absolutely is, I can't believe it. I think most people couldn't.
due to the excessive strain that mining put on users computers, many ESEA users were
left with fried video cards and astronomical electricity bills.
In the end, a class-action lawsuit saw ESEA hit with a 1 million dollar fine
for a combined total gain of just over 3700 dollars.
I've noticed that, they kind of messed themselves up with the money situation.
In 2014, the entire International esports Federation was exposed for having a
male's only rule that excluded females from participating in their hearthstone
tournament for the upcoming IeSF World Championships. The controversy first took
off when a redditor posted a picture of the ruling outlined in the Finnish IeSF
qualifier leading up to the main tournament. Questioning the organizer's
decision to separate the two genders. When the IeSF stepped in to defend
themselves, they said that their decision to separate the two genders was part of
their efforts to try and legitimize esports as an actual sport.
We have evidence that this actually happened so. Yeah.
The world was furious.
No one could understand how such an outdated
policy could still exist, let alone be upheld for such ridiculous reasons.
Finally, just a day after the IeSF statement went viral, the company decided
to open up its tournaments to all participants.
A huge victory guys a huge victory.
Yeah.
Yeah, well done and well played.
Thought the scandals of 2013 and 2014 were big.
No amount of heartbreak and
disappointment could prepare the esports community from what would later be known
as one of esports most successful yet scandal-ridden years.
In January of 2015,
CS:GO's fans were reeling from what could only be described as the biggest
match-fixing scandal of the games short competitive lifespan.
Netcode Guides beating iBUYPOWER on Season.
iBUYPOWER's CS:GO team consisted of North America's
best in-game leader DaZeD, a brilliant support player AZK an NA super talent
steel, one of the best AWPer's in the world Skadoodle, and eighteen-year-old
CS:GO genius swag, and they knowingly threw their match against Netcode Guides.
A team that they would have typically trounced back in August 2014.
There was already some speculation that the match was thrown as soon as it ended, but it
was quickly brushed aside as nothing more than a rumor.
This is just really surprising.
The story then later resurfaced in 2015 when esports
journalist Richard Lewis brought to light incriminating text messages that
Derek "dboorn" Boorn sent to his ex-girlfriend.
Valve responded in January 2015,
and they banned indefinitely four of the five members of the team, as well as
several others in a highly publicized blog post entitled
Integrity and Fairplay.
It happens, from baseball to boxing, professional athletes
have taken dives for bribes from professional gamblers it destroys the
integrity of the game.
Then in February of 2015,
League of Legends was hit with the scandal of astronomical proportions.
You know that your mom signed the contract with us?
Yeah.
I will make sure you will lose the house.
That's a...that's a promise.
Due to several missed payments from his previous organization Supa Hot Crew and
facing concerns about the potential for missed payments from his new team Meet
Your Makers, Marcin "Kori" Wolski decided it best to
leave MYM in February.
So we have yesterday found out that Kori will not
be playing anymore, BLIZER300 will be playing in place of Kori who's future
with the team is still uncertain.
When informed of the news, MYM's manager
Sebastien Rotterdam was livid. He threatened the youngster with promises
of future legal action and went as far as to say that he would see it that his
mother lose her house. The threats, coupled with subsequent action by the
team to prevent Kori from joining another organization saw the midlaner
returned to the team's starting lineup after just two weeks of absence.
And as you guys see on the graphic, and you guys have heard already, Kori is back in that
lineup from Meet Your Makers.
The team was fined 5000 Euros and Rotterdam was
hit with an indefinite ban.
In 2016, esports as a whole took yet another step
forward as interest in the industry turned into even more money, as multiple
investors entered the space in various forms. But while the rest of the
industry was making massive strides forward, Starcraft took two steps back.
Oh my gosh. You, you feel the pain that they feel.
Still reeling from 2015's match-fixing
scandal, one games greatest players Lee "Life"
Sang-hoon was arrested and indicted in 2016 for receiving money to
intentionally throw maps. If the scene had any hope for redemption, Life's
arrests marked the death of that.
This is like one of those moments where it's...the
universe just works against you.
But Starcraft wasn't the only game that saw
gambling create controversy around the scene. A large portion of the money that
came in with the influx of new investors in 2016,
particularly in CS:GO, was coming from websites that allowed counter-strike
players to wager their in-game items.
Yesterday and the day before, I have amassed probably an amount of about $16,000.00
and if you don't believe me, let me just show you part of my inventory.
They sponsored the game's
most popular players, the biggest tournaments and everything else.
and we found this new site called CS:GO Lotto.
Though largely unregulated, these websites
appeared to be relatively harmless on the surface. That was until a youtuber called
"Honor the Call" exposed the dishonest and underhanded business practices behind
one of the biggest gambling websites at the time: CS:GO Lotto.
President Trevor Martin and Vice President
Thomas Cassell. So these two own the website
CSGOLotto.com and the allegedly do fake gambling and pretend to win thousands of
dollars and also sometimes pretend to lose it too.
Without disclosing that they
were owners of the website, fellow youtubers Trevor "TmarTn" Martin and
Thomas "ProSyndicate" Cassell promoted CS:GO Lotto to their combined audience of
10 million subscribers. When the shady dealings came to light, Valve
responded with a cease and desist letter that forced the shutdown of a majority
of the gambling websites in July.
Now in 2017, with the announcement of NA LCS franchising, and the continued
anticipation of the soon to come Overwatch League that includes major
sports investors like Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots and Jeff Wilpon
of the New York Mets, esports takes yet another step towards maturity and
professionalism. So the question is, how will this affect your favorite esport?
Only time will tell.
But what we do know is that despite the influx of outside
money, despite the corruption and despite the scandals, it's always been the
communities that have kept esports thriving and in the end, it'll be the
communities that will continue to ensure that esports grows beyond our wildest dreams.