Bulgarian team Windigo Gaming has been awarded first place in the World Electronic Sports Games 2018 tournament more than a year after the competition ended. The final WESG match they won was in March 2019. The top prize reached $500,000 and was thus one of the biggest in CS:GO history.
However, in 2019, players never received this money. Seven months after this match, the team was forced to stop playing due to lack of financial resources. One of Windigo's founders, Artur Ermolaev, claims that even a fraction of the amount owed to the team by the WESG organizers would be enough to sustain the team.
At the same time, the organizers of two other tournaments in which Windigo participated had problems with payments. E2Tech, which hosted the Moche XL Esports event, claimed that the bank was returning the payment addressed to Windigo for an unknown reason. In this case, the delays were probably caused by bureaucratic difficulties due to the fact that the team was registered in one country and the receiving bank was in another.
By the end of 2019, the team managed to resolve the legal issues, but now Alibaba, which was the organizer of WESG, had other difficulties – they first attributed the delay in payments to protests in Hong Kong and then – the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, players did not receive their money until May 2020, after the story received attention in several publications on major thematic portals. Currently, the former Windigo members continue to play internationally, playing on various teams.