Professional Players’ Rights and Obligations in Counter Strike: Global Offensive

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the structure of contracts between professional play ers and organizations within Esports, more specifically, the Counter Strike: Global Offensive ti tle. Because of the secretive nature of the industry, and also because of how young it is com pared to its counterparts, verifiable information on the responsibilities and benefits a profes sional athlete can expect to have in the space, is hard to find. Therefore, the research questions could be equated to "What are the rights and obligations of professional CS:GO athletes?", as well as "How did they reach this point, and what can be expected in the future?”. In consequence, qualitative methods of research were used, in the form of interviews and short discussions with people in the industry from multiple fields. In addition, written, audio and video material such as articles or podcasts were written and created by credible sources with respectable status in the space of CS:GO. Furthermore, the author’s personal contract with the organization GamerLegion served as a basis of verifiable information. The analysis of the data obtained was conducted by the author, as someone with wide knowledge and reach in the specific industry, aided by the opinions and hypotheses of the peo ple mentioned previously. As a result, the objectivity of the information could be questioned, and this is why different standards of filtering were used, such as verifying the same detail from at least two unconnected private sources, or a reputable public one. The results of this research consist of the gathering of otherwise scarce and spread-out infor mation on the topic of player's contracts with organizations, as well as in the addition and presentation of beforehand unpublicized details, unavailable publicly until the point of publica tion of this work. As for the conclusions that can be drawn, they are mainly speculations on the future of the mul tiple topics in the Esport, again in the form of predictions of experts and repeating patterns from the past of this industry and equivalent ones, such as defining the concepts of “The Esports Bubble” and “Market Inflation”. The thesis was not commissioned by any third party and represents only the author's own per spective.