The Philippine eSports industry remains competitive in the Southeast Asian (SEA) region and even in the world, as seen in the country’s total prize money share. In 2024 alone, the Philippines garnered about $4.4 million (PHP 252.7 million) in prize money, making it the top earner in the SEA region and the top eight around the world, behind Denmark by about $40 thousand. A young, tech-savvy population, increased mobile gaming accessibility, and international investments in local teams fuel this strong eSports industry.
However, executives at eSports organizations face significant financial management challenges, ranging from distributing salaries to handling operational expenses, which can hamper growth and demoralize talents and players.
The Philippine eSports Growth and Operational Complexities
Aside from local organizations, like Blacklist International and TNC Predator, foreign organizations have been signing Filipino eSports players due to the extreme competitiveness in the Philippines. Organizations like Talon Esports (Hong Kong), Aurora Gaming (Serbia), and Team Falcons (Saudi Arabia) have been investing in Filipino talents to increase their chances of winning tournaments and securing top prizes.
Organizations are also investing in multiple games, especially due to the life-changing prize money in the yearly Esports World Cup. In 2024, the prize pool reached more than $60 million (PHP 3.4 billion) distributed to a variety of games.
As organizations dive into the competitive ecosystem of eSports, financial operations can be a source of headache for executives due to the following complexities:
- Salary and Bonus Payouts: According to an article from Spin.ph, a professional eSports player in the Philippines typically earns between PHP 10,000.00 to PHP 30,000.00 ($170 USD - $520 USD) per month. The monthly salary can increase by up to 15% if the player’s team wins a major professional tournament. Additional income can also be received from sponsorships, streaming, and shares from merchandise earnings. Managing recurring and variable payouts to players, coaches, and staff requires significant time and effort.
- Prize Pool Distribution: Major tournaments like the M6 World Championship award millions in prizes, requiring compliant cross-border transfers. Traditional methods often delay payouts by weeks.
- Operational Expenses: Foreign organizations adopting Philippine teams must manage variable expenses such as vendor payments, travel costs, and equipment purchases, which require careful monitoring.
- Accounts Receivable: For sponsorships and merchandising, eSports organizations need robust accounts receivable systems to collect payments accurately and ensure proper reconciliation. Since these payments often come from multiple payees, slow reconciliation can delay payouts.
- Customer Support: In the fast-paced eSports environment, immediate resolution of financial issues is critical. To achieve this, executives need precise information on account management, transaction statuses, and product guidance to make informed decisions quickly.
Key Financial Pain Points for eSports Executives
With these operational complexities in mind, eSports executives experience different pain points in managing their organizations. If left unchecked, these issues can lead to unhealthy relationships within the organization and with investors and supporters.
- Cross-border payment inefficiencies: Many Philippine teams under foreign ownership face hurdles in receiving funds from international sources. Legacy systems, like traditional banks, involve high fees (3-5% per transaction), delays, and manual reconciliation. For instance, transferring sponsorship funds from Europe to a Philippine team’s bank account often involves intermediary banks, which increases costs and processing time.
- Compliance and Tax Reporting: The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) mandates strict anti-fraud measures and tax reporting for any financial transactions. Organizations struggle with:
- Withholding Taxes: Prize money and salaries require deductions (e.g., 15-25% for non-resident players) for tax compliance.
- Financial Statements: Once an eSports organization is audited by a third party, auditors verify that all revenue streams, including sponsorships, advertising, and tournament prizes are accurately reported and compliant with financial regulations.
- Scalability Limitations: As teams expand, bulk payments or sending payouts in one go becomes critical. A mid-sized organization with more than 50 players leads to more than 20 hours per month in processing individual transfers via platforms, like PayPal, which charges 3.49% per transaction plus fixed fees.
- Lack of Real-Time Tracking: Executives often lack visibility into the statuses of their financial transactions, which unfortunately can lead to disputes. In a related issue from a talent involved in conducting eSports tournaments, a Filipino shoutcaster noted that delayed payments have become common in the eSports industry. Automated reconciliation of received funding can help ensure that payouts to intended recipients are made as soon as possible.
- Lack of competent customer support: Delays or errors in payments, with no updates from customer service, can disrupt operations, affect player morale, and damage relationships with sponsors and partners. In a competitive market where many fintech platforms vie for eSports organizations’ business, poor customer support can undermine a company’s unique selling proposition. Poor customer support is detrimental for a fintech company handling salaries, tournament winnings, sponsorship deals, and merchandise sales.
NextPay for Streamlined Financial Management
NextPay, a fintech company backed by well-known investors, like Y Combinator (W21), Gentree Fund, and Golden Gate Ventures, specializes in empowering businesses to automate sending and managing money - all in one powerful platform. In 2024 alone, NextPay processed $100 million (PHP 5.8 billion) worth of transactions, bringing its total processed money to $226 million (PHP 13 billion) since it began operations in 2020.
If you’re an eSports executive, NextPay, with its vast experience in handling payouts from businesses in different industries, can resolve the pain points you’re experiencing through the following solutions:
Salary and Bonus Payouts
- Localized payout channels
- NextPay supports transferring money to more than 70 local banks (e.g., UnionBank, BDO, BPI, GoTyme) and e-wallets (e.g., GCash, Maya) in the Philippines.
- NextPay offers a much lower payout fees as compared to other banks or e-wallets, as low as PHP 10.00 for every PHP 50,000.00 worth of transferred money. For more information about the fees, you can visit our Pricing Page.
- Batch payouts
- In NextPay, aside from having an access to instantly pay an employee, supplier, or merchant, you’ll also have access to batch payouts to multiple recipients. Guess what? You can send payouts to multiple recipients in a single batch, even if they nominate different banks or e-wallets. How wonderful is that!
- All you have to ensure is that recipients’ details have been inputted correctly (which you can do as well via batch upload) and create a disbursement in NextPay’s platform.
To learn more, read the help article here: How do I send money via NextPay?
- Scheduled transfers
- Either it’s a quick transfer or a batch payout, you can also easily schedule transfers in NextPay. As long as the authorizers already approved a disbursement, payouts will be processed on the scheduled time.
- Be mindful of the crediting timeline for each payout method. Also, NextPay provides visibility on tracking transfers’ statuses which you could share to your recipients, aside from the SMS and email notifications.
Prize Pool Distribution
- Instant Payouts
- Prize money is often distributed among various entities. For example, in major professional tournaments of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, 25% of the prize money earned by the team would go to the eSports organization, while the remaining 75% would be distributed to the players.
- Tax Compliance
- The email received by each recipient contains the details of their payouts, such as the deductions due to government contributions (e.g., SSS, Pag-IBIG, PhilHealth) and withholding taxes. During payout creation, these deductions can be specified individually so recipients can see a detailed breakdown of their payouts.
- For easier monitoring of these contributions, a dedicated NextPay workspace will be extremely helpful.
Operational Expenses
- Vendor payments
- NextPay enables scheduling bulk payments to equipment suppliers, streaming platforms, and event organizers, to name a few. It is also possible to process reimbursements, which will be extremely useful in case the organization follows a system of utilizing petty cash.
- API Integration
- If your organization has tech capabilities, you can also utilize our Payout API, which allows you to automate the entire process of sending payouts to different suppliers or partner merchants.
Accounts Receivable
- Collecting sponsorship deals
- NextPay will soon launch an accounts receivable solution that can help eSports organizations collect sponsorship deals from various entities. This solution will include automated reconciliation for easier monitoring of fulfilled obligations. To learn more, you can book a discovery call with NextPay via this form.
- Managing subscription fees
- Aside from collecting sponsorship deals, the accounts receivable solution will also be helpful in reconciling received payments due to subscription, purchase of merchandise, and many more. NextPay knows that aside from sponsorship deals, an eSports organization needs to have a consistent revenue stream to ensure the longevity of the organization. That’s why we’re developing this solution to help business entities, like eSports organizations, in maintaining an effective and efficient cash inflow management system.
Customer Support
- Customer Centricity
- Since its inception, NextPay has prioritized customer satisfaction. As NextPay aims to empower businesses, it provides amazing services that benefit customers through and through. This has been supported by the customer stories that NextPay received and serve as its inspiration in delivering products needed by our customers.
- Daily Support
- NextPay provides daily support via email and chat from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM (Philippine Standard Time), including weekends and holidays, to meet customer needs. This exemplary service is reflected in NextPay’s 91.4% Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score of NextPay, significantly higher than the industry standard of 75% to 85%.
Strategic Advantages for eSports Organizations
These features of NextPay will offer the following benefits to the executives of an eSports organization:
- Cost Savings: If the total headcount of recipients of your organization exceeds more than 50, the upfront cost will be worth it as NextPay will also save your valuable time and reduce operational headaches.
- Time Efficiency: With NextPay, executives will spend just 30 minutes monthly on payroll - that’s more time to focus on expanding their organization.
- Compliance Assurance: Having the ability to document deductions and download transactional data will help in financial reporting and minimize audit risks.
- Scalability: NextPay features such as bulk payouts and the accounts receivable will resolve the operational bottlenecks of an organization so they can focus on what’s next, such as expanding in different games.
- Peace of Mind: NextPay’s customer centricity ensures that all of its customers are accommodated properly and provide peace of mind in times of unexpected issues on their cash flow management.
As the Philippine eSports industry accelerates toward higher revenue in the next years to come, financial agility becomes a competitive differentiator. By adopting NextPay, organizations can reallocate resources from administrative tasks to talent development and global competitiveness. The integration of bulk payments, email and SMS notifications, and upcoming accounts receivable solution positions NextPay as an indispensable partner in the eSports financial ecosystem.