If 2024 was the year esports confronted its “winter,” then 2025 was the year it started to sow the seeds of spring. Across interviews with publishers, team owners, and investors, a consistent assessment emerges: the industry did not pursue explosive growth—it prioritised survival through sustainability.
“I’d call 2025 a reset year,” says Robin Piispanen, GM PRO and Sim at Logitech G. “The fundamentals were strong. At the same time, we saw a continued correction: major organisational restructurings, tighter budgets, and an industry forced to operate with discipline.”
This view of a strategically healthier year is shared by tournament operators at the heart of the ecosystem. Sebastian Weishaar, President of the ESL FACEIT Group, describes 2025 as “a constructive year for esports.” He clarifies, “It wasn’t the largest growth year… but it left the industry in a stronger and more sustainable position.” A key factor, he notes, was a major structural shift: “Open or hybrid ecosystems now represent roughly 50% of the landscape for the first time. That structural change is critical as it lowers barriers, strengthens grassroots pipelines, and creates more resilient competition formats.”
That theme echoes across the ecosystem. Monica Dinsmore, Head of Esports at EA, describes 2025 as a “pivotal year” marked by a renewed focus on sustainability and deeper engagement rather than scale for scale’s sake. Michael Decker, Managing Director at Target Esports, frames the shift bluntly: “After years of massive investments and major esports brands struggling to stay afloat, 2025 may have been the year the industry finally slowed down just enough to recalibrate.”
A Tale of Two Tiers
This recalibration accelerated an already widening divide. At the top, a small group of globally diversified organisations proved resilient by expanding beyond competitive results alone. Clubs such as G2 and Team Vitality leaned heavily into multi-vertical strategies, combining competition, content, culture, and services.
G2 marked its 10th anniversary with initiatives spanning traditional sport in the form of a 7-a-side football team (G2 FC) through the Kings League, original IP such as a webcomic, and fashion collaborations. Team Vitality meanwhile, the Paris-based organisation which has seen enormous competitive success in Counter-Strike 2 this year, pursued geographic and commercial expansion. In 2025, it acquired Bigetron Esports to strengthen its position in Southeast Asia and launched its own marketing agency, RushBee.
“For Team Vitality, 2025 was a transformative year and possibly our most significant yet,” says Danny Engels, Corporate Director of Global Operations. “The acquisition anchored us in the thriving mobile gaming market. Launching RushBee allowed us to monetise our creative expertise beyond sponsorship alone.”
For the middle tier, however, the reset was far more painful. Engels is clear-eyed about the cost: “We cannot, in good faith, call it a ‘good’ year for the industry when peers are facing insolvency or massive downsizing. We have lost hundreds of passionate professionals.” Thomas Hamence, CEO of paiN Gaming, based in Brazil, warns of deeper consequences: “Today, mid- and lower-tier ecosystems are running on fumes. If that layer collapses, so does our talent pipeline. Nobody seems to want to talk about this.”
The Unifying Catalyst: The Esports World Cup
Amid contraction elsewhere, one initiative stood out as a rare point of alignment: the Esports World Cup (EWC). Interviewees consistently described it not merely as a tournament, but as a game changer.
A representative from the Chinese esports organisation JD Gaming told The Esports Radar that the EWC “shifted the competitive calendar and business logic,” pushing clubs toward a more globalised competitive landscape. Crucially, it also introduced new revenue dynamics. “They brought meaningful diversified revenue streams for clubs,” the JD Gaming representative adds—a view shared by Hamence, who credits the event with “injecting meaningful economic energy” into the ecosystem.
This sentiment is powerfully echoed by Fabian Scheuermann, Chief Games Officer at the Esports World Cup Foundation. For him, 2025 served as definitive proof of concept. “The cross-game model isn’t an experiment anymore,” he states. “It works at scale.” He points to the intense, season-long Club Championship race that captivated fans as evidence that this new structure creates durable narrative. “It proved that a cross-game competition works at full scale – it is the most competitive, unpredictable and exciting from start to finish.”
Publisher Power and Structural Tensions
The reset also sharpened awareness of esports’ underlying power structures. Tobias Michael Scholz, an esports scholar at the University of Agder in Norway, argues that 2025 made one reality unavoidable: “Esports is not a self-contained entertainment industry.” Instead, it functions more like a platform economy, with publishers retaining decisive influence.
That dynamic played out unevenly across ecosystems. Valve’s open circuit approach for Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) was praised for competitive freedom, yet criticised by Engels for creating “a more volatile and less stable ecosystem.” By contrast, publishers such as Riot Games were acknowledged for efforts to stabilise their esports ecosystems through improved revenue models, according to G2 CEO Alban Dechelotte.
This year also highlighted the escalating pressures and consolidation at the tournament operator level—a critical layer in the esports infrastructure. The acquisition of Ukrainian organizer Starladder by India’s NODWIN Gaming in January underscored a trend of strategic consolidation, as larger entities build global portfolios to secure scale and diversify risk.
Simultaneously, operators faced the intense challenge of an overcrowded calendar, particularly in Counter-Strike’s thriving open ecosystem. With BLAST, ESL FACEIT Group, PGL, and other organizers all vying for top teams and viewer attention, the schedule became a public point of contention. Public statements about unsustainable “tournament wars” laid bare the operational friction that comes with success. This congestion forces difficult choices on teams and presents a new coordination challenge that the ecosystem must solve as it scales.
Looking to 2026: Discipline and Monetisation
As attention turns to 2026, the emphasis on discipline remains firm. Logitech G’s Piispanen predicts it will be “the year of maturation, integration, and smarter, disciplined growth.” One particularly sensitive frontier is direct fan monetisation.
The consensus is clear. The era of unchecked expansion is over. What emerges from 2025 is a leaner industry—more self-aware, more cautious, and more realistic about its economics. The challenge now is not simply to survive, but to prove that discipline can underpin something enduring.
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