Copyright escapistmagazine
Every year, it feels like a new experimental industry sees esports as some fast way to make some quick cash and get some publicity amongst the brainrotted youths of today. Gambling, crypto, NFTs, and now AI? While places like Yahoo Finance will tell you that esports is some booming industry worth billions, anyone working in esports could easily debunk this. Many organizations operate in the red, relying on sponsors and prize money to stay afloat. As a strange new industry full of experimentation, innovation, and confusion, esports teams and tournament organizers are a bit susceptible to outside influence. There's a reason that Saudi Arabia can so easily take over the entirety of esports, paying teams and fans to show up and buying up every struggling TO. It's also led to esports organizations agreeing to a lot of strange collaborations with questionable companies just to get the moolah. This includes the likes of the US Army, Immutable, and Crypto.com. The latest? AI. Esports community concerned with AI infiltration The esports community has never taken kindly to AI. Even when esports organizations shared seemingly innocent tweets with trending AI art challenges, fans reacted with complete frustration. This hasn't stopped large esports organization Cloud9 from collaborating with JetBrains, an AI-powered coding software development tool. Together, JetBrains and Cloud9 will "build cultural relevance" in the esports ecosystem. This includes JetBrains hosting a Hackathon and creating content for Cloud9, outlining how AI-powered tools help League of Legends, VALORANT, Rainbow Six Siege X, and Call of Duty operations. I envision this going horribly, but we'll have to wait and see how esports fans will react to AI infiltrating these games come 2026. “At Cloud9 we’re driven by a simple but powerful goal: to inspire and connect gamers everywhere,” said Jonathan Tran, President of Cloud9. “This isn’t just another sponsorship, it’s a working model of how technology and esports can come together to spark innovation, creativity, and opportunity.” Cloud9 is no stranger to collaborating with controversial and strange AI-related companies. It previously collaborated with Theta Network to launch a Cloud9-branded AI chatbot called Nimbus. This trend likely won't stop any time soon.
