Sony Interactive Entertainment has partnered with the new sports company RTS to purchase the Evolution Championship Series, also known as Evo, the increasingly popular and long-running fighting game tournament. The acquisition comes less than a year after Evo Online was canceled, following allegations of abuse against one of Evo’s co-founders.
Evo’s statement on the acquisition, posted on Twitter, recognized these claims as one of the motivations for the sale.
A message for our community. For more information, visit https://t.co/6JHZCsJsXr pic.twitter.com/uj0NKRW30m
– EVO (@EVO) March 18, 2021
We want to reaffirm that harassment or abuse of any kind has no place in Evo or any of our future events, and we are taking every precaution to ensure that members of our community are always treated with the respect, dignity and decency you deserve. .
In order to deliver the trust that everyone placed in Evo, we realized that we need an experienced strategic partner who truly respects the spirit of the FGC.
Sony’s own message reflected this statement, announcing that Evo Online would return on August 6-8 and August 13-15. It is an online event only due to the Covid-19 pandemic and will feature Tekken 7, Street Fighter V: Champion Edition, Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate and Guilty Gear Strive.
Many of these developers had dropped out of the event last year, after allegations of abuse made against Evo co-founder and CEO Joey “MrWizard” Cuellar. The charges were brought by a member of the fighting game community and dated to the turn of the millennium in Southern Hills Golfland, a California arcade with a famous Street Fighter scene. He accused Cuellar of often offering large quantities of arcade tokens to boys aged 12 to 16 if they jumped into the water obstacles on the miniature golf course in their underwear only. He further claimed that Cuellar once instigated a bet on the size of his penis, which required showing Cuellar his erect penis. The accuser says he was 17 at the time.
Evo responded by removing Cuellar from the CEO position. Today’s Evo statement does not mention Cuellar, but does refer to the cancellation of last year’s Evo Online due to “surrounding circumstances … a former team member who has been completely separated from our company.”
At the time of the allegations, Cuellar posted a public apology in a deleted tweet. “I was young and reckless and did things that I am not proud of,” he said. “I have grown and matured over the past 20 years, but that doesn’t excuse anything.”
The initial reaction to the acquisition was the concern that Sony could make Evo an exclusive event for games available on Sony platforms, which would exclude popular fighting games like Nintendo’s Smash Bros. Mark Julio from Evo confirmed on Twitter that the event “is still open to all platforms.”