The biggest esports scandals of the past 10 years

Esports is an industry built by a legion of compulsive, uber-competitive gamers who’ve achieved inconceivable fortune and fame through the power of playing videogames. It is bankrolled by a rogues gallery of megarich sports owners who are happy to milk the venture for all of its lucrative upside, without any long-term investment in the culture or the hobby. The fans they cultivate are ravenous, sectarian, and obsessive—known for analyzing the faintest whiff of backscenes drama with the keen attentiveness of a particularly scrupulous Taylor Swift fan. With all of those elements in place, what could possibly go wrong?

Yes, esports has been the site of many controversies over the past 12 years. Some of them are small and contained to a distinct niche, and others are messy and borderline criminal, capable of tanking entire organizations. Together, this list serves as a time capsule of the industry’s white-hot zenith in the mid-2010s, when an obscene amount of cash was being dumped into the pro-gaming bubble, allowing for countless incidents of overexposure, fraudulence, and clueless management. In 2022, stories like these are becoming progressively more rare. The feeding frenzy has moved on, providing more space for the genuine, dyed-in-the-wool esports organizations to thrive—and those grassroots companies are less interested in a pump-and-dump scheme. That’s a good thing, even if I sometimes miss that age of wanton overindulgence. Read on, and despair.

Forsaken brings an aimbot to a Counter-Strike tournament