Cloud9 has been disbanded

Today, Cloud9 has announced that their VG team is being disbanded. You can read about it here, but no specifics are given as to why the team is being disbanded.
It’s honestly quite sad to see one of the biggest and best teams in VG be disbanded. I’m interested in seeing if everyone on the roster will still continue playing VG competitively on different teams or retire.

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I’ve read a lot of messages about this in the past hour or two, but I’ve not seen anything resembling an explanation … not good for the VG Esports scene, unfortunately

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Good they were shit Esports team who loves to throw games (that’s what I heard)

What? That’s unnecessarily harsh! They are an excellent team that has a long list of trophies to their name! Gabe is arguably one of the best roams in the entire game. Reck3d is a stellar analyst with great game savvy!

It’s sad they dropped out without any explanation, but the likely one is a lack of money and not seeing a future with the team. VG’s prize pool has been on the steady decline. It was $120k in 2016 for Worlds. That shrunk to $75 a year later in 2017 for Unified Live.

Not sure what 2018 will bring, but it looks like C9 sees it on the decline.

In any case, this is a huge hit to VG. Losing a big name team hurts us a lot.

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Agree. VG has shrinking payouts and a larger team for future competitions means more expenses.

I hope 5v5 really sparks the growth of VG. Older players are returning from my friends list. There are a ton of players with no rank from last season in 5v5. Either they are old players returning or new players willing to drop $20 with only 1-3 months experience. The new skin system should help with funding.

The really long off season that has little to no competition going on is a bad environment for esports to be in since they are basically paying the players for not doing anything. So if they want to prevent this from happening with other teams, they might want to start doing some tournaments regardless if it is 3v3 or 5v5.

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That explains Oldskul’s empathic cry during Worlds.

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Worlds 2017 had a larger prizepool than Worlds 2016 - its important to compare alike to like - still it wasn’t much larger, which is disappointing.

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Everyone in the C9 roster will continue to play competitive vainglory, as they all tweeted free agent in their twitter (except recked).

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What are your figures? I was referencing this site for the concurrent payouts: https://www.esportsearnings.com/games/449-vainglory

If you look at the collective winnings of even the top players, it’s actually pretty paltry. $30-40k over a few years is basically a part time job at minimum wage.

It’s sad to hear. Since the team was a great performer, I’m guessing it has to do with the game itself.
Some here mentioned prize pools being to low, maybe it also has to do with the ever shrinking view counts. Regular VG8 isn’t as popular as it used to be, which is directly related to the issues raised here.
Hopefully 5v5 will reignite the spark. It’s pretty obvious that the early figures will be high since people want to figure the most effective playstyle, hopefully the matches themselves will be interesting enough to keep them drawn in.

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I believe it’s safe to say between the smaller download count of the game than it’s competitors, the downsizing of viewers, the prize money being too low (as Tiem pointed out, part time, minimum wage levels) and the reality that mobile gaming is still not a threat IN ANY WAY to pc gaming, that this move is not surprising at all.

I wonder how much money SEMC has invested in esports and what the rate of return (or loss) they’ve seen on it up to this point.

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They announced a $140000 prize pool for Worlds 2017. See here for example: https://esc.watch/tournaments/vainglory/vainglory-world-championship-2017

There was a much bigger prizepool throughout the year in 2017 as well.

That said I agree even for the top teams the money isn’t really there yet - its an okay uni student income but nothing like realistically liveable etc.

On viewing numbers you have to keep in mind that they now stream on many platforms and in multiple languages which splits up the viewership.

Also the regular VG8 format was quite viewer unfriendly because it generated to much content to watch - as someone involved in esports I try to keep up with what is happening in each region - but each region was producing about 12 hours of content every weekend for me to try and watch…

I know during Worlds 2017 at the 5v5 announcement part and for those matches they had across all platforms over 100000 concurrent viewers - which is five times the max concurrent viewers of the final of Worlds 2016. So I think the “demise” of VG as an esport is rather a large leap to make.

In any case we shall probably find out some interesting things about the 2018 esports at the launch party stream tomorrow.

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This key bit of information is everything to this discussion.

Yeah in Esports terms that is still relatively small numbers - but for Vainglory it is huge.

Too me that’s not a lot of view for an international final championship. I can see why cloud 9 disbanded but I think 5v5 will reignite VG if done right. SEMC has to stop playing this “get money game” and start actually improving the game. VG already has so many different lootboxs and rng any further is just sad, and the current game’s market is still sad.

Capcom Cup is said to pull in about 2m viewers. 100k ain’t half bad for a mobile game. I don’t know a single one that even has any kind of serious following on Twitch.

I think they might ramp up the price pool for this year because of the all the skins system changes.

Unless I’m missing something the only competitor on mobile with more downloads is mobile legends which is currently in a law suit over copyright from riot games. Also, to my knowledge all the joystick lovers seem to be migrating from mobile legends to AoV from tencent who happens to be involved with riot games.

Heroes of Chaos or whatever it’s called has 10 million downloads but they achieved that years ago and it is now a ghost town thanks to better made Mobas.

The only game I would be worried about taking over esports which isn’t in the same genre is rules of survival. Very competitive and has already hit 100+ million players across all platforms in a matter of 2 months.

Heroes arena may of recently jumped up in users after paying for a Superbowl ad but I’m assuming those users will figure out there are better Mobas.

In my opinion the only game to worry about is AoV as its the best joystick mobile available right now and has serious reputation thanks to league of legends and riot games.

However, if valve ever decides to bring dota with its darkish style like Vg to mobile I’d start getting worried.

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RoS is a PC port game tho…
OT:Also, VG lives if they make the UI wayyy smoother. Right now it needs some touching up, like the party tab, and doesn’t need like 5 currencies. I tried league and the currencies are a lot simpler and fulfill the same goals.