Over the last few weeks, the Professional eSports Association has been seeking to set on their own CS:GO league, in which a number of teams would be invited to compete for a prize pot of a million dollars in the first year. However, when put to a vote it seemed that the teams were not interested due to concerns over long-term financial growth – which has now led to the PEA announcing that the league will now no longer go ahead.

The problem came down to competition with the ESL Pro League, which offered both profit and revenue sharing with the teams involved, as opposed to the PEA’s offer of sharing just the profit. Therefore more players voted to compete in the EPL’s league, seeing the gains they could make as much more long-term as opposed to only short-term gain from the proposed new PEA league. Another factor that had an effect on votes was that teams preferred the EPL’s current more open structure and treating eSports as its own entity, as opposed to the PEA’s idea of trying to fit old style sports franchising models onto eSports teams. In the end, the vote saw five of the six teams voting to stay with the EPL.

In a statement a spokesperson for PEA commented that “since the time of the original announcement of the PEA CS:GO league, it has become clear to the PEA organizations that there isn’t sufficient financial support in the ecosystem…to profitably operate a third prominent online league, due to the oversaturation of the marketplace and the recent upward spiral in operating costs.”