FISSURE Owes Prize Money to Multiple CS2 Orgs, Including Astralis, FURIA, and G2

FISSURE Owes Prize Money to Multiple CS2 Orgs, Including Astralis, FURIA, and G2

26 Jun, 2026, 21:23

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Last updated: 26 Jun, 2026, 21:23

FISSURE has confirmed that it still owes prize money to fifteen Counter-Strike 2 organizations after tournaments held under its own series.

In a recent statement, the tournament organizer acknowledged outstanding obligations to teams that competed at FISSURE events in 2025.

The statement lists 3DMAX, Astralis, Aurora, FURIA, G2, GamerLegion, Legacy, Lynn Vision, MIBR, paiN Gaming, Team Falcons, Team Liquid, The Mongolz, TYLOO, and Wildcard as organizations still awaiting full payment.

FISSURE specified that these obligations arise solely from prize pools awarded at tournaments in the FISSURE series, rather than separate commercial deals or salaries.

Scale of the prize pools

Public information about FISSURE Playground 1 and FISSURE Playground 2 indicates that the first event offered a prize pool of 1 million US dollars, and the second, 1.25 million US dollars.

In both events, the share reserved for organizations was larger than the share allocated to players, which increases the portion of funds that remain unpaid when tournaments end with delayed prize transfers. TYLOO and FURIA won the two Playground tournaments in 2025.

FISSURE Owes Prize Money to Multiple CS2 Orgs, Including Astralis, FURIA, and G2

Previous complaints and responses

In January 2026, Graham "messioso" Pitt, chief operating officer of 100 Thieves, publicly accused FISSURE of failing to pay prize money to multiple Counter-Strike teams for tournaments held the previous year.

He said that teams had been unable to secure payments for several months and estimated that the unpaid amount was close to 950,000 US dollars.

Soon after Pitt's comments, the tournament organizer released a statement acknowledging delays in paying prize money and describing the situation as a temporary result of problems with its payment infrastructure and banking procedures.

The organizer added that it had contacted 100 Thieves staff to clarify details of the outstanding payments and repeated that it intended to meet all of its financial obligations.

Financial situation and cancelled events

According to 2025 reports, FISSURE was already facing financial pressure, seeking new investors, while some sponsorship talks failed after the organizer requested around 3 million US dollars per tournament.

The same coverage described cuts to travel support for press and reductions in logistics budgets for teams compared with earlier events, pointing to tighter spending even before the current prize pool disputes reached the public.

In early 2026, FISSURE cancelled several planned CS2 tournaments, including FISSURE Playground 3 in Shenzhen and two summer events originally scheduled for 2026 and 2027, citing scheduling conflicts with other major competitions and poor results from previous events held during player breaks.

Statements about these cancellations presented them as responses to calendar congestion and lessons learned, while also confirming that other FISSURE events would proceed as planned.

Separate comments from PGL chief executive Silviu Stroie indicated that several Tier 1 CS2 events in 2026 would not take place after organizers such as FISSURE and StarLadder missed Valve's deadlines for announcing full tournament details.

Current status for affected teams

The latest statement on prize money describes the outstanding debt as limited to the fifteen listed organizations and says that FISSURE is in direct contact with each of them.

The organizer says that paying all remaining prize pools is its main focus and that it intends to fully clear these obligations, though no public timeline for complete payment has been given.

For the involved teams, the announcement confirms that prize money from their FISSURE appearances remains outstanding, but that the organizer at least formally recognized the debt. For the time being, there's not much to do other than wait and hope for the best, sooner rather than later.


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Feature image credits: FISSURE

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