Lamborghini to lawsuits: Sola Fide goes bust

This is The Final Circle, a newsletter about Apex

Sola Fide became another high-profile business casualty of the esports world this week when its owner, Oddity, was sanctioned by Riot for failing to pay League of Legends players. Shortly afterward, Oddity announced he’d dissolved the business.

The team, whose name refers to the Reformation creed that “faith alone” leads to the forgiveness of sins, found that it needed more than faith to stay in business—a pile of cash would have been a great start.

The organization left players across its esports offerings without their salaries for “an EXTENDED period of time,” according to Gentrifyinq, who, along with the other Aim Assist boys, have officially parted ways with the defunct organization.

On an Apex stream last night, Oddity offered more detail about what exactly went wrong with the team’s finances: “Significant investor issues and inability to transfer funds kind of cucked us,” he said, referring to SF’s undisclosed overseas investors and the problems that arose from transferring funds internationally. Of course, international bank transfers take between 1-5 business days—hardly the “EXTENDED” period of time the Apex squad has been playing without a salary, or the nearly five months that its former League of Legends team has been waiting for checks.

“We don’t owe the community answers,” he added, as he responded to increasingly pointed questions about the team’s finances. I asked Oddity why the Apex squad had also gone without payment, if the issue was caused by Riot’s overzealous prosecution of timely payments, as Oddity had said previously. He clarified that “transfer issues didn’t originate just for Riot. It was over all the organization.”

That squares with the work of Twitter sleuths, who quickly found that Sola Fide had signed articles of dissolution on April 9th, effectively shutting down the business before the Riot judgment.

According to Riot, despite signing contracts that began in January 2021, SF’s League team never received any payment from the organization; furthermore, they never saw a dime of their winnings from a tournament, which was transferred directly to SF’s coffers and used to pay “independent contractors,” possibly referring to the large roster of SF’s staff or content creators.

To hear Oddity tell it, Riot “made a very big gripe” about paying the League of Legends players on time. “I personally think Riot handled it pretty poorly,” he said, and reiterated that he plans on appealing the ban.

This week’s judgment concludes a dizzying fall from grace for a team that had spent months aggressively expanding a roster of content creators and esports players. Zachmazer, thekine, and Diego were among their more prominent pick-ups for content creation, while their competitive team, Aim Assist, was the 4th best team in the North American Apex by ALGS points.

Here is the entirety of Gentrifyinq’s statement about the situation:

Urban, who managed the Apex team at Sola Fide, also posted his thoughts on the situation, giving a breakdown of the financial picture behind the scenes. He’s since deleted the post, but the screengrabs I took paint a portrait of an organization in financial freefall since shortly after Oddity bought the team in September 2020—the same month he was looking for someone to ride shotgun with him in the Lambo.

According to Urban, in December, Oddity turned down roughly $240,000 in sponsorship deals because the interested brands weren’t “elite,” and that in January 2021, shortly after SF entered League of Legends, an offer was made to the organization “that would have allowed Sola Fide to exit the League of Legends scene at a profit.” Instead, SF continued to operate without paying players. By March the team had disbanded and by April, Riot banned Oddity from participating in League of Legends esports until January 2024, when he can appeal for reinstatement.

We may never know the details of the financial situation at Sola Fide in the last few months. But outright grift is common in esports, and a lot of these organizations are founded on not much more than misguided optimism. Investors with cold feet aren’t a dependable source of income, and there’s no particular reason to suspect Sola Fide ever had the cashflow to pay dozens of content creators, two esports teams, and a staff of 15, not including video editors and other (presumably) independent contractors on the design team.

Finally, simply filing articles of dissolution isn’t the end of Sola Fide. When businesses fold with outstanding debt, any parties that are still owed money have a bevy of legal options available to get that cash, including legally resuscitating the company for up to 20 years. While Oddity has promised that everyone will get their money (without saying when and how), the fact is that the people SF owes are young, busy, and probably unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the idea of legal proceedings. Working without payment for months this year, they’ve already demonstrated their belief in Oddity’s good faith. But as we’ve learned, faith alone isn’t enough.

Sola Fide joins a rapidly growing list of underfunded teams like Cooler, North and Altiora that have gone out of business in 2021.

---

Like The Final Circle? Want to support high-quality, independent coverage of the Apex scene? Subscribe to the weekly email newsletter. It’s free and always will be.

---

If you can’t beat Valorant, copy it: Apex Arenas borrows the esport-ready economy shooter format

I’m going to be working on a bigger story about the release of Apex Arenas and its role, as Respawn dev Carlos Pineda developer pitched it, as “Apex Auto Chess.” But for now, let’s look at the basics. If you didn’t catch the launch trailer and description (linked above), Arenas is going to be a 3 vs. 3 arena economy-based shooter, with rounds like Counter-Strike and Valorant.

Pineda’s original pitch for what became Arenas mode

Auto Chess, as you may know, was a side project of DOTA that became incredibly popular. Riot’s juggernaut League of Legends was itself little more than a copy of DOTA when it was released, and after League became the behemoth it is, Riot again copied DOTA’s Auto Chess to develop its spin-off Teamfight Tactics. Spin-offs that attempt to capitalize on the successful formula established by other games are now a grand tradition in AAA games, a way to capture more market share and bring new customers into the fold. Epic’s Fortnite: Save The World, for instance, saw the breakout succcess of H1Z1 (where our very own ImperialHal first made his name as a fragger) and PUBG and tried out its own battle royale mode—that’s worked out pretty well for them, wouldn’t you say?

Taking a page from Riot’s book, Respawn is looking to continue its aggressive expansion of the Titanfall universe. As other commentators have pointed out, Arenas mode has some incredible advantages over battle royale when it comes to esports. One team versus another is easier to watch and understand than 20 teams vying for dominance in that final circle. It’s easier for tournament organizers to orchestrate six players than sixty. It’s easier to follow for observers, and easier to cast. Respawn has already indicated they’re intersested in supporting an esports ecosytem for Apex “across modes,” and Arenas looks primed to fill some sort of role as the game matures. It could become a supporting act to the battle royale scene, it could become the breakout hit of Apex esports—a lot depends on the next few months and the reaction it gets from fans and players.

Everything else:

• A massive blog post from Respawn Lead Engineer Samy Duc details the online infrastructre and server issues of Apex. Fans who wish that the Apex dev team was more transparent should be pleased to see the topic covered so exhaustively. At the same time, Duc is obligated to defend the technical decisions made by his team, and ultimately insists that updating the tick rate of Apex wouldn’t make much of a difference to game performance. For a less biased perspective on the effect of tick rate on the feeling of fairness in a game, may I suggest you read my Washington Post article on Valorant’s 128-tick servers? Pros and other experts believe the difference is easy to feel. But as Duc points out, running quick servers is incredibly expensive. If only EA had the money…

• Another developer blog post, this time by Dave Osei, explaining the Olympus map update.

• Esports talking head Jake Lucky picked up the story of Shiv and Tufi, airing Shiv’s on-stream outburst that got him banned to the wider gaming community. Dare I say cringe?

• The YouTuber Hawksnest has posted a gameplay video from the Apex Mobile beta. Looks a lot like Garena FreeFire to me.

• The Realm debuted its private lobbies for community tournaments.

• Dave Aubrey at The Gamer reports that white loot will leave the loot pool.