eSports threaten to unionise

Wargaming – the developer behind World of Tanks – has teased the idea of unionising eSports in order to protect professional players.

Speaking to eSports Pro, Wargaming’s European head of eSports Nicolas Passemard said that he was thinking about creating an eSports union in order to help plays resolve issues and disputes.

“We don’t want it to become a Wargaming organisation, we want the pro players to run it for the pro players, but we want to help them with things like legal advice and extra security so that they are better protected.”

“It comes from a need to do something. We faced a few issues and incidents, and of course we didn’t like that because these incidents were not in favour of the players.

So at a point we have to make a decision, either we get more directly involved or we keep having issues. We still want the players and the teams to lead a life of their own, because if we help them too much or if we do things for them they kind of lose the warm feeling of doing it themselves or they lose motivation, but in the end we had to do something.

So we looked at some options and the best one is to help the pro players create a union for themselves. We have to do it, there will be issues, maybe we aren’t ready [for a players union] but we will find a way.”

Wargaming has added that it would be prepared to assist with legal advice and security but wouldn’t run the union itself.