With rumors and reports suggesting that partnered VALORANT teams in the VCT Americas league are going to cut back on player salaries next season, one of the major content creators who’s gotten involved with team ownership expects the tier-two scene in North America will only get more expensive.
Following community backlash to yesterday’s news that The Guard won’t participate in VCT Americas, and after Riot’s response to that backlash, massive streamer and fledgling esports org owner Disguised Toast spoke about the state of VALORANT in NA as a whole in a lengthy stream. Despite The Guard seemingly exiting VALORANT, he thinks teams next year will still go all in on getting that VCT Americas spot, even if it’s just for two years.
“Next year, people plan to spend even more money,” he said regarding tier-two NA VALORANT. “You get all these orgs coming in and they want that franchising spot. So they’re going to be paying $7K or $8K [per month]. The tier-two scene is going to get even more expensive and the tier-one scene is going to get cheaper.”
For these organizations, the move is a risky one as they’d be paying top dollar for talent with the hopes of earning just a single spot via Ascension, although that does improve to two spots starting in 2025. But since the Ascension spot belongs to the org and not the players if an org-sponsored team wins, then the org could drop their players and sign league minimums for the two years they spend in VCT. Toast claims that a good portion of the VCT teams have figured this out now.
Related: The Guard reportedly set to release entire VALORANT team after promotion to VCT falls through
“They finally realized, ‘Wait a second. We can just pay these players the minimum and they’ll say yes. Because they have to,’” Toast said. “So teams are wising up; ‘if we all pay the same, none of us has to overpay.’ Next year most teams are paying league minimum.”
100 Thieves and Cloud9 are reportedly both considering league minimum salaries for their VALORANT rosters next year. While on stream, Toast said the VCT league minimum is $6,000 a month, but the official Riot ruling is actually $50,000 across the year, which is even less.
