Jeremy "Disguised Toast" Wang shared a candid perspective on the "terrible" eSports business that's on course to lose him a million dollars in less than a year. His insight into the troubled industry arrived mere weeks after an unprecedented player strike caused Riot to delay the 2023 League of Legends Championship Series (LCS).
Disguised Toast rose to prominence in 2015 with informative Hearthstone YouTube videos which he originally narrated while wearing a mask shaped like a toast with a pair of sunglasses and a fake mustache. He promptly branched into streaming and competitive play, all the while diversifying his content to include a wider array of games. In January 2023, the variety streamer founded his first eSports team DSG, with that Disguised Toast venture subsequently revealing an all-female Valorant team roster. Four months later, Wang also decided to buy a League of Legends team with the goal of competing in the North American Challengers League (NACL).
And while the combined overhead of his teams promptly reached $1 million, Disguised Toast has yet to make any money on his foray into eSports. That's not likely to change for the time being, not least because DSG's first Valorant roster has already been disbanded in May following 11 consecutive losses. Additionally, Riot's recent decision to stop mandating pro LCS organizations to field NACL teams threatens the future of the LoL league that DSG is eyeing. In a recent YouTube video recapping these challenges, Disguised Toast labeled eSports as "one of the worst" industries to invest in.
He posited that even the currently most popular eSports leagues and teams continue to bleed money on a regular basis, concluding that "no organization is safe" right now. As for the root of these issues, Disguised Toast pointed to unsustainable business models as the main culprit behind this state of affairs; most major sponsorships are currently drying up because brands never saw "any significant return" on their investments, leading them to be "scared" of eSports, the streamer said.
In response to these challenges, Disguised Toast launched a new Patreon channel intended to help keep DSG's eSports ambitions "alive and running." In the first week since its debut, the channel already amassed nearly 1,300 members, most of whom are paid subscribers, contributing a total of $3,800 a month. That's a far cry from the $1 million that Disguised Toast already lost on his ventures, but his second attempt at fielding competitive Valorant and League of Legends teams promises to be much more cost-efficient, with the streamer revealing that some "drastic changes" are planned for the coming months.
A number of recent developments in the gaming industry appear to be reflective of the eSports bubble that Disguised Toast described in his latest video; weeks before Riot's controversial decision to effectively defund the NACL, Blizzard confirmed it doesn't intend to support Diablo 4 eSports events.