Venezuela's gamers see esports as a way to escape the country's crisis
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Loading... - Audrey Davis
- 21 Oct 2022
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Hidden on one of the top floors of a half-abandoned shopping mall in Altamira, an upper-class enclave of Caracas, lies the Spartacus Arena Esports building. Behind a gate, flashing neon lights, and faint music, a cold white-washed room with pods of desktop computers plays host, for one night only, to Venezuela’s Gorgeous Gamers — a team of five professional online video game players and their coach Soraya Borelly. Their stony demeanor betrays the deadly seriousness of their game.
They are led by 28-year-old player Rayko Missael, known as “Arrakiz” in the world of the online multiplayer game Dota 2. The game features matches between two opposing teams of five players, each occupying and defending their own separate space on the map. When Rest of World met Arrakiz, he was engrossed in one of the many intense on-screen battles of the arena’s all-night tournament. It was a friendly game against the Colombian national team that the Gamers would be facing in an upcoming league competition.
Venezuelans were once among “the world’s top gamers,” according to Borelly, but in 2014, they faced a sudden decline in the rankings, as an internet and electricity crisis rocked their country. By 2018, Venezuelan gamers had disappeared from the international scoreboards.
“All of my friends were convinced I needed to leave the country and play professionally,” Arrakiz told Rest of World, “I never actually thought that I could do this full-time [in Venezuela], until Gorgeous Gaming came into the picture.”
Borelly referred to the team as “cyber-athletes.” And they trained, just like athletes did: the morning began with hand stretches and mobility exercises, followed by practice for up to 12 hours a day, including studying their opponents’ style of gaming. Players that showed a lack of commitment were dismissed. The gamers who made the final team signed contracts which specified prize percentages from their tournament winnings — though Borelly would not comment on the specific split, the industry average has 60% of earnings go to the managers and 40% to the players.
The situation presented a unique opportunity for foreign investors: Venezuela was a land of skilled gamers desperate for money, but with few resources to compete on the global stage. Gorgeous Gaming formed in January 2022, when Russian coaches and former gamers Dmitrii Gerasimov and Ivan Zhdanov arrived in Playa El Yaque, a beach on Margarita Island. They were planning to bring Venezuelan Dota 2 players together on the cheap, paradisiac island to train them for a world esports championship tournament called The International, which was produced by game developer Valve and featured a $40 million prize, the largest single-tournament prize of any esport event. Gorgeous Gamers told Rest of World their recruitment for this new investor-driven gaming boot camp was grueling, but promised a chance out of poverty. Read More…
