30th October 2018, LONDON, UK. - An open letter to Valve and the community

From: a group including teams, players, talent and agencies that attended GESC events in 2018.

It is with regret that we feel it important to make public our issues with Global Electronic Sports Championship (GESC) and its CEO, Mr Oskar Feng.

Our issues revolve around non-payment of more than $750,000 pertaining to both GESC Indonesia and GESC Thailand, two Dota events that took place in March and May this year, as well as individual and group consultancy services provided since 2017.

The players and teams have not yet received their prize money from the organisation from either of these two events. This, despite GESC having an agreement in place with Valve to adhere to the 90 day limit on prize money pay-out.

In addition, Code Red Esports, Layerth and several other independent companies and individuals remain unpaid (either in full or part) for their services, conducted professionally and delivered on time and without complaint.

Further, the on-screen talent and independent contractors who attended and worked in production also remain unpaid from both events.

Several of the group have attempted to obtain payment by issuing late notice for payment invoices and through several conversations with Mr Feng over the last six months and despite continued assurances that all debts would be settled in September, they were not. Several of our collective gave Mr Feng and GESC a final deadline of October 31st 2018 for full and final settlement. With the deadline now almost upon us, no further communication has been received from GESC or Mr Feng in order to resolve all of the issues and payment looks increasingly unlikely to settle our issues.

Our intention, through this open letter, is to alert the community, players, teams and other people who may be approached to work at further events produced by GESC (two events in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are pending on their website) and a project seemingly under way for 2019 called “Project Hero”. We feel very strongly as a collective that no further involvement with GESC events, or any other project under Mr Feng’s guidance, should happen until all debts are settled in full and that if debts are settled immediately and further events take place that any money due to any party should be placed in escrow before any person or company agrees to attend.

While we respect that Mr Feng and GESC have said they will resolve the issues on multiple occasions, they have not done so in a timely manner and continue to miss deadlines for payment promised and fail to respond to reasonable requests made by email. We also note that Mr Feng continues to attend other esports events in Asia and have talks with companies and individuals about his “successful events” in 2018, with a view to producing more in in the future.

We feel very strongly that businesses should not come in to esports and use companies, teams, players, talent and professional individuals and not pay them for their services and in a timely fashion. This should also serve as a warning to other businesses that enter esports, to ensure their model for payment works and they are not searching for new sponsors and investors to pay off a previous agreement, these are failings that go back as far as the CPL in 2007 and, we would consider, lessons that should have already been learned