The Gonzo Awards 2023

We interrupt the annual self-congratulations to announce the return of the only esports awards that matter.

So another year is in the books and you all know what that means. It’s a chance for everyone to reflect on their contribution to the shared experience that is humanity, to meditate on the nature of mortality and ask ourselves if we’ve done enough to ensure our spirit echoes through the years after our body is long gone. Of course I am just kidding… It’s actually the time of year where everyone from esports gets round in a circle, places the biscuit of social media into the middle and then proceed to jerk off like their lives depended on it. “2023 WAS THE BEST YEAR BEHOLD AT ALL I ACHIEVED LOOK ON MY WORKS AND DESPAIRRRRRRRRYYAHHHHH.”

Esports is an industry where everyone is all too quick to forgive the transgressions of their colleagues and instead focus on shameless cross promotion. We never take an inventory of the fuck ups and everyone covers for the bad actors. We only self police when it comes to “bad takes” and we do it via x.com. While everyone spends their time trying to convince teenagers that they’re a really good person, the young adults that drive our industry are locked into bad contracts, exploited and worse and it’s the people who speak out about it that are more often than not condemned. “Why must you only highlight the negative” they say before working themselves up into a seizure over a Tweet from 2011. It is with all this in mind that I bring back the annual Gonzo Awards.

Many of you won’t know what the Gonzo Awards are so let me give you a run down of their illustrious history. I started them in 2010 as an antidote to all the annual fart-huffing that goes on in esports. Even then I could recognise that ours was a silly industry filled to bursting with the bungled and the botched, a carnival of incompetence promoted by hucksters that push the grifters through it’s rusted turnstiles… By 2016 I had been airlifted into a plush TV job where it was considered best practice not to articulate these opinions lest someone pay attention to them. There I lay in the soft bosom of the machine on my best behaviour and a newly appointed ambassador for esports, things that mostly kept me away from a keyboard for over two years. Then in 2019 my life mostly fell apart and I have peered out at this ever worsening industry from a bottle for the best part of four years. But now I am back, an independent writer, an award winner and with more responsibility and vigour than ever to tear down this dreadful circus one act at a time.

The past few years has seen several factors dramatically change the face of the industry. Most notably those greedy North American owners burned through all the venture capital money so they could LARP as Jerry Jones for a couple of years. We’re now in the so called “Esports Winter” where the only kind of sponsorship deals you can get are from unregulated gambling websites and dragon dick dildos. The perpetrators of that great fraud have of course walked away unscathed and are now making deals with the Saudi Arabian state to continue to fund their tawdry fantasies, all the while paying lip service to causes and beliefs that would get them imprisoned or even executed by their new business partners. Incredibly they still refuse to shut the fuck up.

We’ve also seen the rise and fall of the franchise model, another American wet dream whose remnants we have to clean off the sheets… Huge up front buy-ins for theoretically guaranteed revenue that never materialised because esports has no functional business model have driven us back to the open circuit model. Can’t just blame the Americans for this one though… Both ESL and BLAST duped the entire Counter-Strike community by simply changing the word “franchised” to “partnered” and ran the same grift, which will now be officially bust up by Valve in 2025. Moving forward expect all the same assholes that tried to use their spending power to insulate themselves against the price of failure to pay lip service to how great the open circuit actually is all while making secret backroom plans with Saudi Arabia to build something suspiciously similar to what went before.

Esports also officially went mainstream the evidence of which is the overall reduction in quality of the fans. Bigger numbers but lower engagement, the new school is so repulsively selfish, short-sighted and ill informed they’ve actually driven out a lot of the hardcore fan base that would have actually paid for the slop that tournament operators serve up. Now in their place we have frazzled zoomers who can’t string a sentence together and think a substitute for a full stop is the skull emoji. They want everything, pay for nothing and treat esports with the same reverence as the last TikTok video they watched. From the ground up we can now say that esports has become an utterly pointless sham where the average figurehead has all the gravitas and credibility of a cryptobro. In its current form it must be destroyed and that can only be achieved by constantly highlighting its failures and reminding outsiders that there is truly nothing for them here.

So we are so back listing all the flops and failures, the cretins and the craven and the moronic and the malicious in the 2023 Gonzo Awards. Keep an eye out for your friends and foes as we post the awards across the coming days. The list of the awards handed out this year are as follows:

• Worst Event of The Year

• Worst Decision of The Year

• Most Irritating Fanboys of 2023

• Most Pointless E-Drama of 2023

• Wasted Opportunity of The Year

• The Riot Games Award For Great Games Balance & Development

• Worst Promotion of The Year

• Worst LAN Performance of The Year

• Worst Manager of The Year

• Biggest Scam of The Year