Mirrored from https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/TeamLiquid/status/1679883703496081410
Text of the second tweet in the chain (which is not exactly the same as what is said in the video):
In a few days, Team Liquid — and much of the esports world — will participate in #RiyadhMasters. Since last year, Saudi Arabia has increased its investments and aims to build itself into a hub for esports and is nearly unavoidable. Saudi Arabia’s laws and policies on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, migrant workers, native tribes, and political speech do not line up with our values or the values of the majority of the esports community. While there has been some improvement in the country, more needs to be done.
We believe that Team Liquid has a responsibility to raise awareness and push for an esports community that welcomes all. We’re committing $50,000 USD to Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps LGBTQ+ people all over the world escape life-threatening persecution, and $50,000 USD to initiatives and events that help women and LGBTQ+ people in esports. This is in addition to the $47,500 we’ve already donated last year.
We will also continue to work with ESL to guarantee the safety of our staff and players in the region. We hope the community will remain outspoken about these events and that other organizations will also help raise awareness.
We know this won’t please everyone, and we understand that the community will talk. That’s good. We believe that this is better than the silence that would come otherwise.
Why is he looking off-camera? It looks like he isn’t talking to use, but to some other person.
Or is he reading a script?
Edit: so in summary, they’re saying that the humans rights issues are troubling, but the money is good. To offset their participation, they’ll donate some of the prize pool to charities in the region.
Not sure if that’ll really change anything.
Actually they didn’t say that they’re donating some of the prize pool. They “just” said $50k. Donating an actual part of the prize pool (a percentage) would probably involve agreement of the players and either they didn’t get it from all of them or they didn’t try.
Seems like this is “organization money”.
From the video:
the money that’s flowing in from a price money perspective, a participation perspective, it is absolutely enormous in a way if Team Liquid does not participate it leads to all sorts of challenges
[…]
in the end we are making these decisions for the health of our company, that’s definitely true. and we understand that may not be good enough for some of you, but we hope that there’s some understanding of the situation that we are in
The prize money is just too high. I don’t blame them.
Honestly, the whole thing with them trying to be a hub for eSports will probably blow higher when some categories that actually gave a high presence of LGBTQ+ players ends up getting a high profile event there.
I mean fighting games. Lots of people of varied gender, sex and color in there. I can’t think of something more than that other than Speedrunning.
Basically, yeah, I think people make noise over this, but the noise would get louder if a lot of top participants and most spectators are directly affected by it and make that elephant impossible to ignore.
It’s inevitable that these situations would happen, which really exposes how small the tournament organization pool is for Dota2 :/
I mean even if it were larger, 5 million $ for one tournament is life-changing money. Until we figure out a way to not concentrate wealth at the very top, this will continue.
