Tundra Esports founder Maxim Demin has stated publicly that “Dota 2 salaries are inflated” — and in an interview provided to Esports Insider, published 25 June 2026, he has gone further, laying out the structural economics that drove the London-based organisation to sell its roster to 1win Team ahead of the Esports World Cup and The International. The sale came after a season in which Tundra won four trophies and sat comfortably inside the world top five. For a UK-registered organisation that walked away from $14.8 million worth of competitive history in good standing, Demin’s candour is not a post-mortem — it is a live audit of a scene that cannot fund its own ambitions.
Tundra left as the season’s most decorated team, and that context is the whole point of Demin’s argument
Tundra entered the Dota 2 scene in early 2021 by signing a roster previously known as mudgolems, a stack that included 33, skiter and Nine. Over five years the organisation accumulated $14.8 million in tournament winnings and lifted one Aegis of Champions. This season alone the squad won four trophies and remained a genuine world top-five team — not a fading programme rationalised on the way down, but one sold near its competitive ceiling.
The timing matters because it removes the easy narrative. Demin is not explaining why a struggling team was wound up; he is explaining why a winning one became financially untenable. The roster, kept intact, transferred to 1win Team, who will carry the players into both the Esports World Cup and The International. “Most importantly, the deal allowed the roster to stay together and continue competing under a new organisation,” Demin told Esports Insider. “For the players, that provided stability, and for the fans, it meant they could continue supporting the same team they had followed throughout their journey.”
Betting-company money inflated the wage market, then regulatory pressure withdrew the subsidy almost overnight
Demin identified three causes for the exit, the most structurally significant of which concerns the intersection of gambling sponsorship and wage expectations. “Over the years, we’ve seen more money enter the scene through sponsorships, increased viewership, and the arrival of well-funded organisations, particularly those backed by betting companies,” he said. “That has naturally pushed both salaries and buyout fees significantly higher.”
The problem is straightforward in retrospect. Betting-backed organisations were effectively subsidising a salary floor that conventional sponsors — hardware brands, peripheral manufacturers, regional tech companies — were never positioned to match. When regulators tightened the environment around gambling operators in multiple key markets, that subsidy retreated. Salary benchmarks, set during the boom, did not follow. The result is a structural mismatch that a Tier 1 org either absorbs as a loss or exits.
Prize-pool income and conventional sponsorship cannot bridge the gap that betting companies left behind
The second pressure Demin identified is the deterioration of the prize-pool case. Dota 2’s crowdfunded model produced the world’s largest prize pools during its peak years, and those figures shaped expectations about what top-tier esports should be worth. As The International’s crowdfunding contracted and Valve restructured the competitive calendar, the prize-pool argument for sustaining high wages weakened considerably. “In previous years, larger prize pools helped justify those costs,” Demin noted. “But the economics of the game have changed significantly.”
The comparison with Counter-Strike is instructive, and Demin raised it directly. CS2’s Major ecosystem includes sticker revenue that flows to participating organisations, a mechanism that creates a structural floor beneath event winnings. Dota 2 has no equivalent. Our analysis of the TI 2026 EMEA qualifier structure noted how compressed the competitive calendar has become; fewer meaningful events means fewer prize-pool shots, compressing annual income further still.
| Revenue lever | Dota 2 | CS2 |
|---|---|---|
| In-game team revenue | None | Major sticker income shared with competing orgs |
| Prize pools | Declining from crowdfunded peak; now Valve-funded | Consistent Valve-backed Major prize pools |
| Betting sponsorship | Previously dominant; heavily restricted in key markets | Present but not the primary income floor |
| Salary benchmark | Set during betting-org boom; not yet corrected downward | Partially stabilised by sticker revenue floor |
A UK-registered organisation stating this on the record shifts the conversation for every European Tier 1 owner still in the game
Tundra is one of the handful of UK-registered organisations to have competed at genuine Tier 1 level in Dota 2, and arguably the most successful. When its founder characterises the scene’s economics as structurally broken rather than pivoting quietly, it sets a precedent that the wider industry rarely sees. The disclosure is particularly notable given the current state of European esports leadership: when Mika Kuusisto stepped down as ENCE CEO mid-season in June, it signalled a broader recalibration of how established organisations are thinking about long-term commitments in a tightening market. The Dota 2 case is more acute, because the game lacks the diversified income streams that allow CS2 and VALORANT organisations to absorb a difficult sponsorship cycle.
The trajectory looks familiar from other titles. Our piece on the LCS Spring 2026 viewership collapse showed how a scene can lose both audience confidence and sponsor appetite faster than player contracts reprice — a pattern Dota 2 appears to be replicating through different mechanics but toward the same destination.
- Regulatory withdrawal. Stricter rules around gambling operators removed the primary subsidy that had kept Tier 1 wages viable across Europe; Demin named this as the first and most immediate structural pressure on his organisation.
- Declining prize-pool returns. Dota 2’s crowdfunded prize model has contracted significantly from its historic peak, reducing the justification for absorbing high monthly wage bills across a full competitive season.
- No sticker-equivalent revenue. Unlike CS2, Dota 2 offers organisations no in-game revenue mechanism, leaving every team entirely dependent on sponsorship and event winnings with no structural floor beneath them.
- Salary anchoring. Wage expectations set during the betting-company boom have not adjusted downward with the market, creating a persistent mismatch between what conventional sponsors will pay and what top players expect to earn.
“Over the years, we’ve seen more money enter the scene through sponsorships, increased viewership, and the arrival of well-funded organisations, particularly those backed by betting companies. That has naturally pushed both salaries and buyout fees significantly higher.”
— Maxim Demin, founder, Tundra Esports, speaking to Esports Insider
Without a structural revenue fix, Dota 2 heads into The International 2026 with a question mark over its European Tier 1 ecosystem
Demin has laid the argument out in sequence: betting sponsors raised the price, regulators removed them, prize pools declined, and salaries never adjusted. The three reasons he gave are structural rather than circumstantial, which means they apply with equal force to every European organisation running a Tier 1 Dota 2 programme on similar funding assumptions. Tundra’s decision to sell at a competitive high rather than absorb losses through The International cycle suggests the calculation was made some time before the announcement.
The next thing to watch is whether any remaining Tier 1 European organisations follow Tundra out before The International 2026 roster lock. If one or two further rosters transfer or quietly dissolve in the weeks ahead, Demin’s Esports Insider interview will have functioned less as an explanation of what Tundra did and more as an advance warning of what the scene is about to become. For those tracking the full picture of Dota 2’s competitive health heading into Shanghai, the TI 2026 qualifier bracket and EMEA routes piece gives the competition context around which these organisational decisions are playing out.
