My Two Cents on Publicization of Ember’s Player Salaries

So, internally among the company, we knew that releasing salary information would spark a lot of discussion and be a divisive issue in the community. Informing people of the pay given at a competing organization has direct, real world impact on the other organizations and could even potentially lead to players not re-signing with their teams after the spring split, presuming the player finds that other organizations can offer more competitive compensation. I’ve decided to write a small post detailing what I think about the decision and what ramifications it might have going forward. I’ll try my best to minimize my bias, but I am a player so there will be some. Also, please don’t judge my English too hard, I’ve taken 0 AP English courses and haven’t written much since I graduated high school in the summer of 2014.

First, knowing how much other players are making in an official, legitimized capacity directly benefits the average LCS or NACS player. There were multiple organizations, more so in the CS than the LCS, that, when factoring in the average number of hours a professional player trains, where below minimum wage.

I’ll give a real world example, but for the organization’s benefit, I will omit their name. One player was originally signed with a monthly salary of $1250 USD to a team attempting to qualify for NACS. It’s not uncommon for a player to be “working” 80 hours a week after one factors in scrims, solo queue, team meetings, and vod review. Most teams also work every week of the month. At that pay, the player is earning 1250 / (80 * 4) = ~3.91 USD per hour. Not only could they be earning over double this wage flipping burgers at McDonald’s (California minimum wage is $9.00/hr), they would also be treated as an employee at McDonald’s vs an independent contractor at their gaming organization. Any player smart enough and dedicated enough to make it to the NACS or LCS should be capable of realizing that they are being fucked. By knowing how much other organizations are paying, a player can better negotiate his own salary when discussing terms. If he’s being severely underpaid without due cause, he could simply leave the team after his term ends and search for greener pastures.

These players are , in many cases, forgoing higher education or work opportunities to play for these teams with the hope of qualifying for LCS, yet these teams are often founded without making LCS in mind. Even when LCS is in the founder’s mind when creating the team, the roster that qualifies will not necessarily be the roster that gets to compete in the next LCS split.These organizations pick up challenger teams usually to either expose people to their brand(C9T v1/TL.A/CLG.Black/TSM.Darkness), guarantee their LCS squad a spot in the League in the event they would, under normal circumstances, potentially be relegated (C9T v2, CST/F5), or work towards qualifying with the aspirations of selling their spot for an easy .5–1.5 million (CRS.A/CST).

With the way the current system works, the organizations can easily control the flow of information to and from a player during his contract as well; this makes it hard for a contracted player to get accurate information about what he potentially could be earning. A hypothetical organization A can pay a player $X/yr. Even if organization B is interested in him and offers a salary of $3X/yr, organization A does not need to tell their signed player that he was just made an offer for triple his income. This organization A can withhold information regarding offers during their player’s contract terms and pressure him to re sign as his contract is about to end, giving him little to no time as a free agent to take offers and negotiate between multiple parties, which is a normal thing to do in a job market. If we had a software engineer making $100k/yr at a company, and a new start up offered him $150k/yr to leave his company, at least under California law, he should be able to do this at any time In no way, can his original employer withhold the fact that he is actually being sought after by people willing to increase his compensation by 50%. I’m all for any poaching measures, but this system clearly favors the organizations and Riot’s recent “poaching” rulings with Badawi and Shim show that Riot is willing to severely harm organizations that are conducting in this “horrible” behavior. Yet of course when Bjergsen, Zion, or Double break rules in regards to poaching, they’re given a slap on the wrist. It’s a bit funny how unwilling Riot is to be fair and equal in their punishments here. Popular pro = slap on the wrist vs someone without a big online persona = forced to sell all stake in their company??

That’s all I really have to say about this. This is my first post about this and I hope it can contribute to the discussion in a meaningful way.