The Bulgarian team Windigo Gaming received the award for first place in the World Electronic Sports Games 2018 tournament more than a year after the end of the competition. The final WESG match, where they won, took place in March 2019. The main prize reached $500,000 and was thus one of the largest in the history of CS:GO.
However, in 2019, players did not receive this money. Seven months after this match, the team was forced to stop playing due to lack of financial resources. One of the founders of Windigo, Artur Ermolaev, claims that even part of the amount that WESG organizers owed the team would be enough to support its existence.
At the same time, problems with payments arose among the organizers of two more tournaments in which Windigo participated. E2Tech, which ran the Moche XL Esports competition, claimed that the bank was returning a payment addressed to Windigo for an unknown reason. In this case, the delays were probably caused by bureaucratic difficulties due to the fact that the team was registered in one country, and the receiving bank was in another.
By the end of 2019, the team managed to resolve legal issues, but now Alibaba, which acted as the organizer of WESG, has encountered other difficulties – first they explained the delay in payments due to protests in Hong Kong, and then – spread of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, players received their money only in May 2020, after attention to this story was drawn in several publications on major thematic portals. Currently, former members of Windigo continue to play internationally, performing in various teams.
