Streamer Disguised Toast loses a million dollars with his esports team. He sees the blame for this in e-sports themselves.
Who is the person you are talking about?
How is esports going for Disguised Toast? In January 2023, Wang created his own esports team, DSG, which competed in Riot Games shooter Valorant. Things weren’t going too well for the Disguised Toast team, however, and after the first seven games the team was tied 7-0. The failure continued after that and the team lost their place in the Valorant Champions Tour with a score of 0:11.
In March 2023, Wang also created a women’s team in Valorant, for which he was criticized because the team consisted primarily of well-known content creators and not established professionals.
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When the North American LoL teams parted ways with their Academy lineups in late May, Wang saw an opportunity and entered the MOBA’s NA Challenger League (via Twitter). A short time later, he received the reply from his accountant, telling him that Disguised Toast is on track to lose a million dollars – twice what he originally thought:
He told me I’ll be spending a million dollars this year, double what I expected. He sent me this spreadsheet with all the red numbers and I found that the earnings section was hidden. I asked him, ‘Why did you hide that?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s not hidden, there’s just nothing there. They don’t make any money’.
Disguised Toast via YouTube
Why is Disguised Toast making a loss? Wang sees the reason for the modest financial situation in the market itself, specifically in e-sports. It starts with sponsors wanting to distance themselves from e-sports because teams have not kept their promises to sponsors in the past, Wang says in a video on YouTube.
Among the teams’ broken promises, Wang cites failure to win in major tournaments such as the Worlds, as well as low clicks on YouTube videos and the like produced by the teams. According to Wang, the sponsors are simply doing negative business and want to leave the scene after their current contracts with the teams expire.
According to the streamer, the lack of sponsors means that not his team, but all teams in North America are in a bad financial situation: “If you look at any e-sports organization in North America, they are all either broke or going broke. And I mean everyone,” says Wang, adding, “Believe me when I say everyone loses a lot of money. Lots of people will be laid off, no organization is safe right now.”
What is Disguised Toast doing to make up for the loss? In the YouTube video, in which Wang talks about his financial situation since getting into esports, the content creator also shares what he does to still make money for the team.
He himself is now accepting more sponsors for his own non-eSports related videos because each sponsor allows him to pay a player another month’s salary. This gives him more time to figure out how to “make it work.”
He is also working on merchandise that he can offer. Organizations like Team Liquid and 100 Thieves show that this can be a viable business concept.
However, Disguised Toast is not the only content creator to have their own esports team. With Elias Nerlich and his “Focus Clan” and HandOfBloods Eintracht Spandau, two German creators have also dared to take the step.
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