Popular Dota 2 streamer, Janne "Gorgc" Stefanovski, and Team Secret’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), John Yao have called out esports organizations for selling "shady" Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs). A Non Fungible Token is a piece of digital art that can be an image, an audio or video clip, and more. Every piece is unique and is stored as a unit of data on the Blockchain network. Though Yao did not specifically mention any esports organization, Gorgc has been quite vocal in this regard on his livestreams, firing shots at OG and Alliance. While OG has already dropped three NFT sets in the past seven months, Alliance has just released its first NFT.
Gorgc and Team Secret's CEO label esports organizations' NFTs a scam
Gorgc bashes OG’s NFT
On 6th July, 2021, after OG released its third NFT set which seemingly sold out in 10 seconds, Gorgc hit back at them on his Twitch livestream on the same day. He said that the NFT, which costs $150 USD each, had nothing to do with Dota 2.
Furthermore, OG's apparent sale of NFTs worth $500,000~ in two hours completely astonished Gorgc, who said that it was simply not possible.
They sold 3,326 (3,336 in actual) times $150 in two hours? No way in hell dude. I will f***ing bet everything I own on the fact that they did not sell that many. Zero chance. Zero chance they sold $500,000 worth of boxes in two hours. There’s not enough money in Dota that people would ever pay for that.Gorgc
Further, Gorgc stated on his livestream that if OG had indeed sold such a large amount of NFTs, there should have been some engagement in its tweet’s comment section. As he went through the 20 comments and 63 likes at that time, Gorgc noticed that there were only a few users who had talked positively about OG’s NFT, and commented that none of these users were seemingly Dota 2 or OG fans.
So, he concluded that these comments were fake. He added, “How does the value of the NFT increase when nobody f***ing wants it? Tell me. How does anybody want it? It’s a dogsh** scam”.
He further went on to elaborate on this saying, "This is not real dude. It’s a big schmuck thing, you know. They buy them all and try to create this false narrative of it being limited edition or some sh** because it sells out right away and then people get scammed into buying the resellers. They try to get some easy resellers who are stupid enough to buy it for double the price like $300, right."
Gorgc claimed on the livestream that OG was aware of the alleged scam that was happening around its NFT and was being paid a lot of money. "This is something to create artificial scarcity. OG is being paid a lot of money to do this, by the way, because they know it is scummy," said the Swedish streamer. "It’s one step removed from a pump and dump crypto scheme right? And they are getting a lot of money for it."
This was not the first time Gorgc called out OG on its NFTs. Earlier this month, he had criticized one of OG's NFT releases on his livestream, calling all NFTs "dog sh** and a scam."
Gorgc called out Alliance’s Loda Momo NFT as well
On 23rd July, 2021, Alliance, in collaboration with Binance and MOBOX, announced that they had created an NFT called 'Loda’s Momo.' Jonathan "Loda" Berg is Alliance's co-owner who was depicted in the MOBOX. On 29th July, Alliance said that it was giving away this NFT “worth ≈$50,000.”
In response, Gorgc once again claimed that this was a scam and that this was in no way worth $50,000. This upset him and so he asked his livestream viewers not to fall for these organizations’ NFTs. He said that these organizations are only going to stop once more people call them out.
Money is not everything. They care about their reputation. The reason Alliance is doing it now is because it didn’t hurt OG’s reputation for anything at all. It should have. It should have been like "OG this is not cool. Stop trying to scam people. It obviously brings no value to the world. It’s also bad for the environment", which I know a lot of you don’t care about but it is. NFT transactions cause a lot of harm to the environment and they are completely valueless.Gorgc
In the livestream, Gorgc then stated that Loda had texted him clarifying that the Alliance NFT was not a scam. As he talked to his Twitch chat, Gorgc mentioned that he would look at the Alliance NFT once more, although he still was pretty convinced that it was a scam, calling it a “Ponzi Scheme.” In addition, he apologized to anyone he might have offended by calling it a scam since he was not entirely informed on the subject. Gorgc, however, said that he was very adept at spotting scams.
Additionally, Gorgc said that he was not calling the NFT technology ingenuine but these organizations are exploiting this technology to scam people. As an illustration, he compared it to the stock market in the 1990s, when a lot of shady things used to happen.
Loda addressed the situation by issuing a clarification on Twitter stating that Alliance did not sell any NFTs, and did not ask people to buy them, and didn't gain any benefits from them. He said that they had created three "Legendary Loda Momo's" out of which they were going to give away one.
Gorgc on other people not calling out Dota 2 organizations’ NFTs
Furthermore, the streamer was annoyed that no other Dota 2 personality had called out these organizations for engaging in such activities. He said these people are afraid of losing their connections with these organizations, so they are "pathetic." Within a short time, a Reddit thread popped up regarding this, which at the time of writing, is one of the most upvoted posts in recent times.
Team Secret's CEO John Yao Calls Out Esports Orgs Releasing "Shitty NFTs"
At the same time, while Gorgc’s stream was live on 23rd July, 2021, Team Secret’s CEO, John, sent a Facebook post calling out esports organizations for selling ingenuine NFTs.
After that, Team Secret’s Twitter handle posted a tweet pointing the finger at OG and Alliance.
AFK Gaming has reached out to OG and Alliance for their comments on Gorgc's statement. We will update the article if/when we receive a response.
