FISSURE chief executive Nikolay Vesnin has admitted that the organiser still owes CS2 and Dota 2 prize money, and he has named the first quarter of 2027 for its next big repayment.
The admission came in an open letter published on FISSURE’s website on 4 November, in which he apologised “to the teams and players who are still waiting for their prize money.” “In short: we acknowledge the debt in full,” he wrote, adding that payments have run since the summer, that about half the CS2 debt is cleared and that Dota 2 payments began in October.
Fifteen CS2 teams are still on FISSURE’s debt list
The letter gives no total, and Vesnin says he does not want to “announce unconfirmed amounts”, so the clearest record of who is owed remains a disclosure page that FISSURE published on 23 June.
That page names 15 Counter-Strike organisations: TYLOO, MIBR, FURIA, Lynn Vision, Wildcard, Team Falcons, G2, 3DMAX, The MongolZ, Team Liquid, paiN Gaming, Astralis, Aurora, GamerLegion and Legacy. It attaches no event or amount to any name, yet it includes both 2025 Playground champions, TYLOO and FURIA, plus Astralis and The MongolZ, whom they beat in the July and September finals.
On 5 November the page still listed all 15 teams, even though it promises updates “as obligations are settled” and Vesnin says about half of the CS2 money has already been paid. FISSURE has published no similar list for Dota 2. In July, though, Russian outlet Esports.ru reported that Anton “dyrachyo” Shkredov, who won FISSURE Playground 1 with Tundra Esports in 2025, had said on stream that he was paid only a quarter of his winnings.
Pressure on FISSURE had been building for months before the letter appeared. On 30 January, Graham “messioso” Pitt, who lists himself as head of operations for 100 Thieves’ Counter-Strike team, wrote on X that many teams were “struggling to even get responses”.
He added that all prize money was “well overdue by this point”. FISSURE replied on its official Telegram channel the same day, blaming temporary payment infrastructure problems and bank procedures, and noting that it had paid more than $7 million in prizes over recent years. The criticism returned on 17 October, when FISSURE announced its next CS2 event. Counter-Strike host and interviewer James “BanKs” Banks posted that FISSURE “must pay all outstanding money in both CS & DOTA, teams/talent etc” before that tournament takes place.
Why Vesnin says FISSURE fell short in 2025
The November letter reads very differently from January’s talk of payment infrastructure. Vesnin now says FISSURE “made serious mistakes in our commercial and financial planning” in 2025, and that the responsibility lies with the leadership, “including me personally.”
The letter lists three causes, starting with an expected deal with a partner in the international English-speaking betting market that was never signed, and a failure to bring in enough sponsors from other sectors. The third was a tournament where FISSURE could not meet the participant lineup targets set out in a commercial agreement, leaving it with losses as costs rose faster than revenue across several projects.
Vesnin says the tournament FISSURE held in China this year, FISSURE Playground 3 in Suzhou in September, allowed it to pay off around half of its CS2 debt. A first wave of payments also reached some Dota 2 teams before FISSURE’s $250,000 Dota 2 event in October, and Vesnin says all available funds from other completed projects are now going towards repayments.
For the rest, FISSURE will agree a repayment schedule with each club individually. Vesnin adds that a “concrete financial plan” should, if implemented, allow the next major phase of repayments “as early as the first quarter of 2027.”
In that same quarter, he promises a public report on the actual progress of payments. He also says prize pools for new tournaments “are now secured before the events begin” rather than depending on the company’s current finances.
FISSURE Playground 4 and the Valve rule behind the debt list
That last pledge carries weight because FISSURE has not slowed down. Its calendar already includes FISSURE Playground 4, a $1.25 million CS2 LAN for 16 teams from 18 to 30 August 2027, with Georgia listed as the visa region.
Fifteen of those teams will be invited straight from Valve’s global VRS rankings, and FISSURE has also announced six Dota 2 events for 2027, while two further Counter-Strike dates are already set for 2028. Vesnin argues that FISSURE has to keep running events, since halting operations now would “significantly limit” its ability to repay those debts. For teams still waiting on prize money from 2025, that is a lot to ask of their patience.
Valve’s published Tournament Operation Requirements do not set a deadline for paying prize money, but they do demand transparency between organisers and the teams that play in their events.
Section 5.3 bars any business relationship between an organiser and a participant, with loans named among the examples, unless Valve approves it and it is publicly disclosed. FISSURE’s June list was published under that section “in connection with its upcoming VRS events.” Under the same clause, Valve can require an organiser to remove such a relationship within two weeks, or it can terminate its agreement with that organiser without cost or penalty to Valve.
