Windigo, 7 months prior to shutting down their CS:GO operation in October 2019 had an amazing run at the WESG $500,000 tournament. It was the most notable achievement for the Bulgarian underdogs who had performed on a different level back then to secure their win. Since then everything didn’t go as planned for the CS roster and the team faced constant upsets in following tournaments which eventually lead to their disbanding. The announcement of Windigo’s CS roster disband came as a shock for fans because the primary reason for the action was stated to be a lack of cash flow by the management.
The management had stated that the team failed to receive payments from multiple events and WESG was among them. As per the statement, the team needed $125,000 (25% of their WESG winning) to keep the operation going. Sadly, the prize winnings at WESG never showed up in the bank account for Windigo and under the growing pressure of better conditions and higher wage demands of the players along with a lack of sponsors, the entire CS operation for Windigo came to a halt. In a Reddit post marking Windigo’s CS operation closure, Maksym Bednarskyi the cop-owner of the organization blamed E2Tech and ESL of withholding prize money which leads to the inevitable shut down of the organization’s cash flow.
Both, E2Tech and Alibaba (Chinese company behind WESG) countered the accusations by claiming that the funds had been transferred multiple times but had been declined by the banks. This was further linked to a bureaucratic problem relating to the multiple bank accounts that Windigo had in different countries. In an effort to neutralize these issues, Windigo had made a new bank account and had tried to receive their winnings but more complications arrived in the form of Honk Kong protests and the outbreak of COVID-19 which further delayed the payment deadline to February 24, 2020.
With all the odds stacking up against Windigo and WESG failing to deliver the prize money within their set deadline, the management is currently thinking of taking legal action against WESG if things escalate further.
