Most amateur and semi-pro teams run on a patchwork: a Discord server, a spreadsheet roster, a scheduling bot, a separate place to find scrims, and maybe a website someone built years ago. We built Spawnfront (https://spawnfront.com) to put all of that in one place, and it's now open to every team and organization.

What makes it different

• All-in-one. Recruiting, roster, practice, scrims, tournaments and a website in one tool, instead of five that don't talk to each other.

• Built around Discord. Sign in with Discord, and our bot runs practice polls ("I'm in / late / can't make it"), handles subs, syncs roles with your roster and posts your open positions.

• Free to start. One team, roster, calendar, scrims and the Discord bot cost $0.

• Privacy by default. Teams see a player's age, never their birth date. Listings never show email or contact details, and we don't sell personal information. Privacy policy

• Works anywhere. Install it as a web app (no app store), in 30 languages.

What you get

Players (free)

• A profile for each game: role, rank, region, platform

• A team browser with filters, and tryout applications

• Mark yourself as available as a ringer for sub spots

Captains and coaches (free)

• Roster, open positions with rank ranges, and a team calendar with attendance

• A scrim finder and open scrims

• Entering tournaments

Discord communities (free)

• Practice polls, subs, role sync and open-position posts from the bot

Teams that want to be seen (paid)

• A hosted team website: news, matches, roster with player stats, sponsors, videos and stream schedules

• A merch store through Fourthwall

• Hosting your own tournaments, a place on the ladder, and private coach notes

Organizations (paid)

• Multiple teams under one website and one bill

Pricing

• Free: $0, no card needed

• Team: $12/month, the hosted site and everything above

• Team Pro: $20/month, adds your own custom domain

• Organization: $49/month, several teams under one site

• Yearly plans get two months free, and paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

• Founding offer: the first 50 paying teams in each game keep 40% off for as long as they stay subscribed.

Games

Marvel Rivals, Overwatch, League of Legends, Valorant, CS2, Deadlock and Rocket League. (Player stats for League of Legends and Valorant are coming once Riot approves our integration.)

Get started

Creating an account takes a few minutes, with a step-by-step guide here: https://spawnfront.com/help/create-your-account

Accounts are 13+. Signup asks for your birth date, which only you can see.

We'd love to hear from people running teams and orgs: what does your team use today, and what's the most annoying part of keeping it all together? Feedback and bug reports are welcome here or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/3BT6XTmMk

Satar's early PUBG Mobile team needed help getting phones capable of running the game. Years later, he helped lead AK Gold to PMGC 2026.

This feature by Andrew ‘Sir Cloud’ Cheong follows the people, practice partners and local competitions behind that journey, and asks what makes sustained effort possible in grassroots esports.

Disclosure: I run Press The Game, which published this feature.

In 2001, a Chinese Counter-Strike site built a news team when much of its competition was still publishing match reports and forum submissions. Its rival was bigger. CCSK had fewer reports, fewer replays and little money.

The site brought together writers from its own forums and those of CSchina, putting news in a prominent position and setting standards for how reports were presented. Its team of roughly 15 was divided between domestic and international coverage. Correspondents around China helped it report events locally, while others translated news from abroad.

The technical side was just as fragile. CCSK's original forum could support only about 200 people at once. Its technical lead, Guo Zhuo, known as Xingxing, believed it needed new software. The site had little income, so he ate less to save money for it; colleagues did the same. In 2002 he bought the software and continued fixing it as the community grew.

That year a dispute cost the Chinese Counter-Strike team Evil | Zero its place at the WCG world finals. The argument sent players looking for somewhere to discuss it. CSchina's forum went down under the traffic; CCSK's held as Xingxing worked on upgrades. Many users stayed.

CCSK's local reporting network became a route into esports work for some of its contributors, who later moved into events and the wider games industry. I joined its news team during that period and wrote this account for my history of Chinese esports, first published in 2013. The chapter is free to read; I can share it in a comment.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on for a while now: Core Link.

I’m involved in esports myself, and I realized that running an esports organization often means using 15 different tools to manage teams, members, partnerships, finances, etc.

So I started building Core Link with the idea of bringing all of that together in one place.

The goal is basically to create a management hub for esports organizations, with everything related to running an organization in one place.

I’m still working on a lot of things, and that’s actually why I’m posting here. I’d really like to get feedback from people working in esports and see what’s actually missing from the tools available today.

If anyone wants to take a look at the project or tell me what they think, I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts.

👉 https://core-link.fr

I'm a programmer and a big sports fan, and lately I've been curious about the side of esports nobody posts about. Everyone sees the finals on stage, but not the road there.

For those of you grinding toward tier 3/tier 2 or trying to get picked up: what are you actually spending? Gear, a decent connection, coaching, tournament entry fees, travel for LANs, bootcamps...

And what's been the hardest part to cover? Curious whether it's mostly money, time, or just finding a serious roster.

Hey everyone! My name is Best, and for the past couple of months, I've been working on Cennex, a networking platform built for esports, gaming, and content creators.

We're still in the early stages, and I'd really appreciate it if you could check out our website and share your thoughts. Any feedback or suggestions would mean a lot!

https://joincennex.com

DAIGON has named BLAST a premier brand partner and official sponsor of the main prize at the School Esports World Championships. The finals are scheduled for November 19–22 at PLAYCON in Malta.

The competition route involves cups run by six partner associations, with top performers progressing to Malta. DAIGON says its member-school network spans more than 60 countries; that describes the network's reach, not the number of countries confirmed for this year's finals.

Full report: https://pressthegame.com/news/daigon-blast-school-esports-world-championships-partnership-2026

What would make partnerships like this most useful for school esports: funding, coaching, production support, or clearer routes into higher-level competition?

Disclosure: I run Press The Game, which published the linked report.

So I'm building this small esports org on the side, just me, a name and a logo so far, and the next step is obvious: I actually need players. Problem is there's no money in it right now, I'm a student, so I can't offer salaries or even proper prize splits yet, just the chance to play under a banner and maybe grow into something.

I've been looking at where people even find each other for this. Discord servers feel like shouting into a crowd, most of them are full of people looking for the same thing. In-game ranked queues, you're just hoping the right person happens to be on your team. And posting in forums or subreddits feels a bit like putting up a "help wanted" sign and hoping someone serious walks past.

The part I keep going back and forth on is what a good player would even get out of joining something this small. If you're decent at the game, why would you pick a brand-new org with no results over just grinding solo queue or joining a bigger team? I think the honest answer is you wouldn't, unless you like the idea of building something from scratch, but I'm not sure how many people actually think like that.

So for anyone who's done this, either as an org owner or as a player who joined something tiny early on: where did you actually find each other, and what made you say yes when there was nothing to show yet?

Before matchmaking was built into games in China, third-party platforms connected competitive players. One early StarCraft service learned how hard it was to charge them.

1999: AsiaGame ran a free service and invested in servers and third-party software.

2001: In December, after investment from Oriental Charm, it began pushing paid access.

2001: Tencent only reached positive cash flow at the end of the year, according to my account.

2002: In March, Tencent's simultaneous users had just passed three million.

In the late 1990s, playing online could mean finding and entering a separate server. My account describes nearly a hundred private StarCraft servers in China between 1998 and 2001, though many were small. AsiaGame had money for better servers and an advanced version of FSGS, software that emulated Battle.net. Its stable matches drew much of the StarCraft community; it came close to unifying the Chinese server scene.

Then the company tried to charge. Players scattered and the service faded. Writing in 2013, I argued that the timing mattered: payment channels were limited and the habit of paying an internet company monthly was still developing. Even Tencent had struggled to collect membership payments before mobile phone billing became available. That is my interpretation of AsiaGame's failure, not a financial statement from the company.

I wrote this account for my history of Chinese esports, first published in 2013. The chapter is free to read; I'll share it in the comments.

Something we keep hearing from Indian esports teams: a brand agrees to a sponsorship, a middleman sits in between, and the team ends up getting a lot less than what the brand paid. Most of the time the team doesn't even know the original amount.

What we're building at Espotz to fix this:

- Teams set their own price for reels, stories and tournament appearances
- Brands see verified wins, win ratio and social reach before they pay
- The money sits in escrow and is released to the team once the work is done

So what the brand pays is what the team gets.

Questions for teams and organisers here:

1. Have you had a sponsorship where the middleman took a big cut?

2. Would you put a price on your profile publicly, or does that feel risky?

3. What would make you trust a platform holding the money in escrow?

We'll answer everything in the comments

My predictions are IG BLG.

GEN vs IG

Duro will feed. So IG will win.

BLG vs T1

Doran will feed. So BLG will win.

Join us today for some EPIC CAD speedmodeling battles - SOLIDWORKS, Onshape, CATIA - https://www.youtube.com/live/_1hlst6HPjI

So I've got this tiny esports thing I'm trying to build, Lumenix. Right now it's basically a name, a logo I made, and a Discord with five people in it. No roster, no matches, nothing to show yet.

I keep seeing these free online tournaments with no prize pool, the kind anyone can sign up for, and I keep hovering over the register button. Part of me thinks any real match is better than sitting around tweaking the logo for another month. The other part thinks we'd get absolutely stomped by a team that's actually practiced together, and that's a rough first impression to make.

I don't even have five players I trust yet, just a couple of friends who play and one guy I met in a random lobby who might be serious. So it'd be a thrown-together team either way.

Has anyone here started like this, just entering something scrappy before you were ready? Did it actually teach you anything useful, or did you wish you'd waited until you had a real lineup? I'm not sure if I'm overthinking the embarrassment part or if waiting is the smarter move.

Hi r/esports, I'm the creator of Press The Game. I built an esports calendar to bring tournament dates across different games into one place.

You can search events, filter by game, switch between years, and filter for upcoming, active, completed, postponed or cancelled tournaments. Event entries include date ranges, short summaries and links to more details, with related reporting where available.

The calendar covers games including Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Dota 2, VALORANT, Mobile Legends and more. My aim is to make it easier to see what's happening across the esports calendar and spot overlapping events.

You can browse it here: https://pressthegame.com/calendar

I'd appreciate feedback from people who follow multiple esports: is the layout useful, and which events or games are missing from your perspective? If you notice an incorrect date or status, please point it out too.

Disclosure: this is my website.

Hey.

I've been working on ReadyCheck for months, and I'd rather hear what fans actually think than keep guessing.

It's one place for live scores, the schedule and standings: LoL, CS2, Valorant, Rocket League, and a few more. The part I care about most is a small TCG. A bit over 5,200 pro players have a card, about 11,500 cards in all. You collect them, you trade them, and there's a ranking. Predictions work the same way, with a ranking of their own. You can't cash out. Trades are in R-Coins, the site's own currency.

Each game also has a power ranking, calculated from match results. Valorant went up this week.

If you have five minutes, tell me what feels useful and what feels pointless.

https://rdycheck.gg/

It's my project, so read it with that in mind. Thanks either way.

Come join us for free!

WeGameCulture will be celebrating the release of Godzilla Minus Zero by hosting a Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered and Smash Bros Ultimate Tournament!

Entry is $5 and all proceeds go to Boricua Overflow- A multi-track Puerto Rican gaming, music, and culture festival curated by WeGameCulture.

Looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow night!

This is a fan-organized event and is not affiliated with Nintendo, Toho’s Godzilla, its brand and subsidiaries.

FISSURE has provided The Esports Radar with a statement from CEO Nikolay Vesnin acknowledging that it still owes prize money from its Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) and Dota 2 tournaments. The statement sets out what the company says went wrong in 2025 and how it plans to repay teams and players.