A few weeks ago, Danish team Meet your Maker also went bankrupt, leaving Dutch gaming legend Manuel ‘Grubby’ Schenkhuijzen without an organisation. It seems worser times are still to come, because the recession only just set in; resulting in lacking or lower sponsor budgets in a very top-heavy market. But is this really not their fault? I don’t think so!

In a market that is only based on corporate sponsoring, it was bound to happen some time. The companies going bankrupt in the past few months were not the strongest few in the bunch; they based their growth upon the marketing budgets allowed by the big-budget sponsors, not on the growth of the market itself.

Neither of these companies would’ve been able to get to the position they were in without the sponsoring of big companies;  they were building a service for gamers, that apparently wasn’t good enough for enough people to pay for!

Crude? Perhaps, but the current market conditions seem to agree with me. The only organisation still standing, and going strong, is the Electronic Sports League, a company that was projecting to be 60% consumer based in terms of revenue when I talked to them 3 years ago. Who knows what they’ve accomplished by now!