Riot Games publicly announced that Southeast Asian esports organization Bleed Esports had been removed from the Valorant Champions Tour and VCT Pacific as a parentered team. In its announcement Riot noted that the organization did not meet specific requirements/failed to fulfill guidelines set forth under the team participation agreement. As a result, Bleed has been replaced by Boom Esports.
Riot’s full statement:
An update for VCT 2025 pic.twitter.com/p46AGL8iDv
— VALORANT Champions Tour (@ValorantEsports) October 4, 2024
Bleed Esports also released a statement acknowledging that it failed to meet its obligations under the TPA, but said that it could still operate a team in Challengers:
Regarding Riot’s decision for our VCT participation: pic.twitter.com/Kda3ZipHqI
— BLEED Esports (@ggBleed) October 4, 2024
Also of note, Valo2Asia claims that Bleed players were informed of the decision “30 minutes before”it was made public.
Over the last several months former employees and agents that represent some players TEA spoke to have noted on background that Bleed has been late in paying its players by several months.
As Bleed is a privately owned company, it is difficult to get a handle on its finances; the company announced a major investment of $50.8M USD from Asia Venture Capital in December 2021 and in January 2024 it announced a partnership with North American esports organization Disguised—the professional esports initiative of Canadian streamer Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang—to support a professional Valorant roster in the Malaysia/Singapore region (SEA). It has also secured a number of partnerships over the years, though one of the most notable was with water purification company Hydroflux, which Bleed claimed generated 1.5M SGD (roughly $1.1M USD, based on the October 2021 exchange rate of 1 SGD = $0.7442 USD).
Bleed’s founder and CEO Mervyn Goh has been at the center of a controversy first unearthed by The Esports Advocate in June related to a Southeast Asian Counter-Strike tournament, the EFLARE $100K SEA Counter-Strike 2 Tournament. That competition concluded on Nov. 19, 2023, but the winning teams have still not been paid nearly a year later.
Talent that helped organize the event claimed that Goh was the point-man for the entire tournament idea, though at the time he told TEA that there were Hong Kong businessmen involved including someone named “Chris Lin.” TEA could not independently verify the existence of “EFLARE” or anyone named “Chris Lin” associated with that company name in Hong Kong.
Ultimately, after talent complained publicly about not being paid, Goh paid those involved in the event with crypto, according to sources. Only one person that was involved on the production side of the event—Mamoon “TeaTime” Sabr—remains unpaid as of this writing, because it is illegal to accept crypto payments in his home country of Pakistan. He is still owed well over $6K.
It should be noted that Goh has claimed that he, like others involved in the production of the EFLARE tournament, claimed be a go-between for production staff and the company in Hong Kong. At the time of our report in June, he told us that he was owed money too (for money he fronted to begin production of the event to productions staff in Q3 2023), which he was reimbursed for.