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Esports organizations tend to be judged by the most visible parts of their business: championships and rosters, sponsorship announcements, content views, social engagement, and funding rounds.
Those signals count for something, but they say little about how durable the organization underneath them is becoming. An organization can win championships while struggling financially. It can build an enormous audience without developing reliable economic engines or raise substantial capital without creating the capabilities it needs once that capital is spent.
That leaves a bigger question about what keeps an esports organization sustainable over time, and winning turns out to be a smaller piece of it than most of the industry assumes.
Competitive Success Has an Expiration Date
Winning creates value. A successful team generates attention and gives sponsors something they want to be associated with. It strengthens community identity and raises an organization’s relevance within its esport, while creating plenty of content along the way.
Competitive success also has an unusual characteristic, which is that it’s temporary. Players leave, and games decline. Publishers reshape their ecosystems, formats change, and eventually another organization wins.
The harder business challenge is converting temporary competitive advantages into capabilities that stay useful after the original advantage disappears.
A championship creates attention, and what counts is what the organization builds with it. A winning roster can attract sponsors, but those commercial relationships must hold up after the roster changes. A popular player can draw a large audience, and some of that audience needs to form a relationship with the organization itself, beyond the individual.
Those conversions are where much of an organization’s long-term strength comes from, and they’re worth as much attention as the next trophy.
Lessons From Complexity’s 23 Years in Esports
Complexity is an unusually difficult test case, because the organization itself was durable for a very long time.
Founded in 2003, Complexity survived multiple generations of esports along with changes in ownership and competitive ecosystems. Over that long competitive history, it built recognizable intellectual property and a committed community, which makes its eventual closure more instructive.
In 2024, an investor group led by founder Jason Lake reacquired Complexity from GameSquare for approximately $10.36 million. Only $750,000 was payable at closing, with approximately $9.61 million carried through a three-year seller-financed note.
By August 2025, Lake was publicly describing an extremely difficult esports economy. He said Complexity was no longer generating enough revenue to properly support a tier-one Counter-Strike team, and the organization exited the game.
The problem turned out to extend beyond one competitive program. In September 2026, Lake announced that management had decided at the end of 2025 to wind Complexity down after evaluating the business, the esports landscape and its prospects for raising capital to address the seller-held note. Complexity has since ceased operations, and its intellectual property has returned to GameSquare.
That outcome doesn’t erase more than two decades of competitive and organizational achievement. What it shows is that a long history doesn’t guarantee a sustainable future. An organization can have brand recognition, competitive capability, community value and experienced leadership and still reach a point where its revenue no longer covers its costs and financial obligations.
How Team Liquid Built Beyond Its Rosters
Team Liquid offers a useful contrast. Its competitive history is substantial, but the organization that exists today extends far beyond individual rosters.
Over time, Team Liquid developed global operating infrastructure and commercial capabilities, along with content and production systems, facilities in multiple markets and leadership structures that reach beyond any single competitive team.
Each of those pieces keeps working when circumstances shift. A facility can support multiple teams and activities, and a commercial organization can build relationships across different games. Content capabilities stay useful as rosters change, and operating knowledge can carry over when the organization enters another title or geography.
In Team Liquid’s case, the most durable assets are the capabilities the organization developed because of the attention its wins created.
Diversification Has Limits
The common response to esports’ financial challenges has been that organizations need to diversify, and there’s truth in that. Depending too heavily on sponsorships, one game, one publisher or one competitive roster creates obvious risk.
Adding more activities doesn’t automatically make an organization stronger, though. A new business line can add revenue while also adding employees, working-capital requirements, management complexity and another dependency.
A better measure is how many durable capabilities and economic engines the organization has built, which can be a very different number from how many things it does.
Surviving the Lean Periods
Sustainability also depends on the ability to absorb periods when the environment turns less favorable. That means being able to lose a sponsor or exit an underperforming title, weather weaker competitive results, and keep operating when outside capital gets harder to raise. It also means management can cut costs without destroying the capabilities the next opportunity will require.
Complexity ultimately faced several of these pressures at the same time.
No organization reaches sustainability once and keeps it for good, since it has to be maintained as the business and its environment change.
The Conversion Principle
Across the organizations we’ve examined, one idea keeps coming up: temporary advantages become more valuable when they’re converted into durable institutional capabilities.
Competitive success can become brand equity, and audience attention can become community. Sponsor relationships can become commercial infrastructure, founder knowledge can become organizational systems, and capital can become assets or capabilities.
The Complexity case adds an important qualification. Conversion is incomplete if those advantages never feed an economic system strong enough to support the commitments required to keep the organization running.
Winning remains one of the most powerful tools an esports organization has, but it’s an input. How long its value lasts depends on what management builds from it, including what the organization is putting in place today that will still serve it once today’s advantage is gone.
Planning for the Long Run
Much of my work with esports organizations involves cost structure and long-term financial planning, and conversations like the one in this article come up often. Feel free to book a meeting with me ; I’m always glad to meet with new organizations.
Sources
- GameSquare press release, sale of Complexity to Jason Lake and Global Esports Properties: https://investors.gamesquare.com/news/news-details/2024/GameSquare-Announces-Sale-of-Complexity-Gaming-to-Jason-Lake-and-Global-Esports-Properties-for-US10.36-Million-/
- Complexity exits CS2 amid financial struggles (esports.gg): https://esports.gg/news/counter-strike-2/complexity-exits-cs2-drops-entire-roster-amid-financial-struggles/
- Esports organization Complexity shuts down after 23 years (Inven Global): https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/26469/esports-organization-complexity-shuts-down-after-23-years
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