In May of last year, the Swedish eSports reality show “Gamerz” awarded a six-month professional contract to five up-and-coming players of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. However, the winners were left hanging after just three months. This week, the second season of the unconventional casting show has started. The production team promises improvement.
Last May, a TV show in the style of “Big Brother” was set up in Sweden by Gamingzone Entertainment, in which twelve candidates lived together in a house for three weeks and were supposed to face challenges.
In the end, the candidates were not awarded any material or cash prize, but a pro-gaming contract for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
The catch: The winners of the first show did not become a super team, but the dream quickly shattered.
Pro-Gamer through Casting Show
After the last broadcast of the show, the five winners began training online together under the guidance of Oskar Holm, one of the coaches of the “Gamerz” show.
In June, the first competition came up, and although the team performed well at the BYOC event of Dreamhack Summer 2017, the promised casting career of the guys went downhill from there.
One of the five winners, Dylan “DH” Hamrini, had to withdraw from the tournament due to his graduation. According to him, the team did not want to train with him anymore afterwards. One of the other participants of the show, Fredrik “Elo” Annerström, filled in for Hamrini. The Gamerz team finished in second place at the BYOC event.
Management Issues
On July 27, 2017, player Jonas “Queenix” Dideriksen reported in an interview about the many problems of the team: After Hamrini missed Dreamhack, the team would have fallen apart. Instead of finding replacements or providing the remaining players with a structure, the management of Gamingzone Entertainment is said to have largely ignored the team from that point on.
Dideriksen stated, for example, that he had not received a single paycheck. Furthermore, the team had not worked together since Dreamhack, and their coach had “no time” left to talk to them. The day after the interview, Dideriksen tweeted that Gamerz had finally paid him.
In the end, Gamingzone Entertainment never paid the winners of the Gamerz show the promised six months’ salaries, but instead settled the team with pay for about three months. The players themselves claim that they offered hardly any objections to the halving of their salaries, as the team barely existed at that point anyway, and some of them had moved to other Counter-Strike organizations.
Gamerz’ first attempt to establish an eSports team, therefore, went only moderately well.
Production Company Promises Improvement
The production company Gamingzone Entertainment admitted in a conversation that they could not keep the glamorous promises they made to the winners of the first season of the show. As Robert Jönsson from “Gamerz” explained, they “underestimated” the challenges of establishing good management for a professional team.
This week, the second season of “Gamerz” started, in which the responsible parties will work with the eSports veterans from Fnatic. The winners are to join the Fnatic Academy and be mentored by the organization.
The grand career is no longer promised to the winners: in CS: GO, academy teams are only secondary players who cannot participate in an event when their owner’s main team is already registered. However, in August 2017, two academy players were promoted to Fnatic’s main team.
