I saw this last night and its got some pretty salacious wording that is really unfair. Its not something that is even a choice or a discussion. Almost every single publisher and main stream sponsor that has any sort of general market focus (publicly traded or 12 year olds and their moms as customers) has a clause that says no association with pornography, firearms, drugs and sometimes alcohol though last one is an easier exception as esports is getting larger.

One reason i heard for this is that shareholders of these large companies view video games still as toys for mass market.

I talked to this Team YP manager two months ago and explained the exact same thing in an email . There were only two sets of emails from our side to the manager, from set from me and one from a colleague, so to a) send them to press b) see an article posted without a chance for us to reply in the investigation from the reporter is pretty wild. This issue started 2 months ago when Team YP reached out to us about producing merch for them and we had to decline. We said we thought there might be some wiggle room and would speak to different partners to see how the felt. The ones i spoke to did not see this type of policy changing soon due to the pay grade it comes down from (people sweating over share price).

Intel, all the publishers etc (except valve i THINK) all have this clause.

The article was a bit shocking when i saw the quotes from the players seemingly not realizing that this is well known at an industry level - we need to do a better job of communicating it to up and comers probably.

If Heckler and Koch or a US based Marijuana shop start an esports team tomorrow it would be an extremely high risk move for their career. We can have all the debates we want about puritanism, conservative thinking and influence on esports blah blah but this is not something that is going to change very quickly. If theres any sense of share price being affected the walls of risk aversion fly right up.

If you are thinking of becoming a professional game with a 3-5 year career span, please consider this as there are many new team ventures with a wide variety of backers.