{"id":917321,"date":"2026-07-03T21:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T02:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/03\/esports-will-never-be-taken-seriously-until-people-get-paid-on-time\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T21:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T02:16:08","slug":"esports-will-never-be-taken-seriously-until-people-get-paid-on-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/03\/esports-will-never-be-taken-seriously-until-people-get-paid-on-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Esports will never be taken seriously until people get paid on time"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"dota\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s no secret that people working in esports have faced payment delays before, and we\u2019ve been reminded of that fact multiple times this week alone<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

First, an artist going by \u201cEDICH\u201d who previously worked on Dota 2 merch for some of the biggest events in esports, including The International\u2019s Secret Shop and ESL tournaments, published an open letter on Reddit<\/a> claiming he has not received his royalties after two years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then, professional fighting games player 2eZ publicly accused ZEDI Esports of failing to pay players while continuing to operate and sign new rosters. They also warned others against joining the organization.<\/p>\n

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FRADULENT ORG TLDR;<\/p>\n

Normally I wasn\u2019t going to post anything, as everything is being handled in the backend, but seeing as how this team is still functioning like normal, with a fresh APEX EWC qualified team pick up, I felt inclined to say something to hopefully save the future\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2014 2eZ (@2eZMK) June 15, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

While these stories suck to hear, neither really surprised me. Payment disputes and delays have been one of esports\u2019 most persistent problems for years. It doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019re a player, tournament winner, caster, artist, editor, writer, photographer, or freelancer\u2026 Chances are, you\u2019ve experienced a payment delay yourself or at least know someone who has.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If cases like these keep happening every other week, it\u2019s pretty hard to take esports as a serious industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Everyone in Esports Has a Payment Story<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Payment disputes happen everywhere in the world and in every industry. However, the main issue in esports is how many <\/em>different stakeholders in the scene experience them. And how often. <\/p>\n

\"rev\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s crazy that we have this, but we literally have an entire <\/em>debt-tracking spreadsheet<\/a>\u00a0in the Dota 2 scene where people who haven\u2019t been paid<\/span> can jot down how much money they\u2019re owed. Though not everyone listed specific amounts, the amounts included already added up to a reported $3.7 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In most industries, unpaid wages are viewed as major failures. In esports, they kind of feel like recurring rites of passage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It really doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re a small-time freelancer or a person who won a huge LAN tournament and played for some of the biggest esports teams \u2013 payment issues can happen to anyone.<\/p>\n

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Esports Runs on Trust<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Having worked as an esports freelancer for over five years, I\u2019ve definitely noticed that many business relationships operate very differently from your traditional industries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve done my fair share of esports jobs, and I can tell you most of my deals have actually been conducted through Discord \u2013 the same platform that lets you pay for animated feet on your profile.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Discord\"
Image credit: JOCA_PH, Shutterstock.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Other than Discord, contact would probably go through Telegram. And in many cases, I couldn\u2019t tell you the client\u2019s full name or who they actually were. I just see an alias and random profile pictures that aren\u2019t their faces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve even sent partnership inquiries to several streamers through email, only to have them redirect me to Discord a few messages later.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve worked with more than 25 clients, yet I can remember signing fewer than five contracts. Sometimes, I don\u2019t even send formal invoices. It\u2019s more like: \u201cHey, you\u2019re going to pay me, right<\/em>?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure people outside of esports will find that insane, but it\u2019s still surprisingly common throughout this industry. For something that\u2019s supposed to be professional, a lot of esports jobs still run on handshakes and trust.\u00a0[Editor\u2019s Note: And blind hope and passion.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Fortunately, I\u2019ve never gone unpaid or faced severe payment delays; a month or two was probably the longest I had to wait. Most people are honest, and the system works \u2013 until it doesn\u2019t. But when something goes wrong, the lack of structure becomes a real problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The Barrier to Entry Is Incredibly Low<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Another reason payment disputes are so common in esports is that the barrier to entry is honestly pretty low. Starting an esports organization is much easier than starting a traditional business.<\/p>\n

You can literally wake up one day, come up with a sick team name, get a logo made on Fiverr, create some social media accounts, and suddenly you have an esports organization. Of course, running a successful one is a completely <\/em>different story, but creating one and making it look a little legit doesn\u2019t take too much time and effort.<\/p>\n

Picking up players isn\u2019t that difficult either. Let\u2019s say there\u2019s this unsponsored stack planning to play an online tournament. They were going to compete for free anyway. Then an organization comes and says, \u201cHey, we\u2019ll pay you X amount of money per month to play under our name.\u201d<\/p>\n

For these guys who were going to play the tournament anyway, that\u2019s a very easy yes<\/a>. Even a small salary sounds like a good deal and an extra bonus. The problem here is that players often have very little information to work with. They don\u2019t know the organization\u2019s finances, who is funding it, or whether it can actually afford those payments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how you end up with situations where orgs sign players before they\u2019ve really proven they can support them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The recent ZEDI Esports controversy is a pretty decent example. When the story started making the rounds, there were comments from Indian esports fans saying they\u2019d never even heard of the organization before:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an Indian organization called ZEDI eSports? I\u2019ve never heard of them before, even though I\u2019m from India. I must say, athletes should do a background check before joining an org.\u201d
<\/em>
\u201cThe Indian Esports comm knows of no such org man. Sorry it happened.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, this doesn\u2019t prove the allegations are true or false, but it does highlight how easy it is for organizations to pop out of nowhere. They can enter the scene, sign players, and start operating without having much of an established reputation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most people aren\u2019t starting organizations with bad intentions; the problem is that esports makes it very easy to make promises and a lot harder to keep them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Accountability Is Hard to Find<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Payment delays don\u2019t happen every day, and most people in esports are honest. Most deals are eventually sorted out. But when they don\u2019t, what exactly are you supposed to do?<\/p>\n

Unlike many traditional sports and industries, esports doesn\u2019t really have a universal system you can turn to when disputes arise. Most of the time, your best option is to make noise on social media and hope the public pressure is enough to get you a response.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why you see so many payment disputes end up going public. People post tweets, Reddit threads, Discord screenshots, and open letters because they don\u2019t really have many other options available.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"edich\n<\/picture>\n<\/figure>\n

Legal action sounds pretty neat in theory, but let\u2019s be real: most esports workers aren\u2019t swimming in cash. If somebody owes you a few hundred dollars, hiring a lawyer will probably eat more money than the amount you\u2019re trying to recover in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You might be protected by labor laws in some countries, but with so much esports work being remote and international, things can get pretty difficult to sort out.<\/p>\n

And because a decent chunk of esports business relationships are informal, things can get messy quickly. Maybe there wasn\u2019t a contract. Maybe communication happened entirely through Discord. Or \u2013 pretty commonly \u2013 maybe the person who hired you wasn\u2019t actually the guy responsible for making payments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When things are running smoothly, everything\u2019s great and none of that matters. But when payment disputes appear, it\u2019s honestly pretty hard for workers to try getting what they\u2019re owed.<\/p>\n

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We Gotta Pay People On Time <\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, esports wants to be taken seriously. We already have million-dollar tournaments, franchised leagues, massive sponsorship deals, and global audiences. We\u2019re even comparing ourselves to traditional sports.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But none of that really matters if we still struggle with something as basic as paying people on time.<\/p>\n

Players should get paid. Freelancers should get paid. Artists should get paid. Casters should get paid. Players who fly to tournaments, compete in them, and win them should also probably get paid. This isn\u2019t a controversial take \u2013 it\u2019s the bare minimum.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had the pleasure of working with several clients in the industry, and I\u2019m happy to say that most of them are honest, and most organizations do the right thing. But payment disputes are still showing up on my timeline year after year. This could be a sign that the industry has some ways to go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we want esports to be treated like a professional industry, let\u2019s start with something as simple as paying the people who keep it running.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Owen Harsono
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no secret that people working in esports have faced payment delays before, and we\u2019ve been reminded of that fact multiple times this week alone.\u00a0 First, an artist going by \u201cEDICH\u201d who previously worked on Dota 2 merch for some of the biggest events in esports, including The International\u2019s Secret Shop and ESL tournaments, published<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":917322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3635,1172],"tags":[7231,8854],"class_list":["post-917321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-esports","category-seriously","tag-esports","tag-seriously"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=917321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/917322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=917321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=917321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=917321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}