Launched in April of 2006, G7 Teams was created to help grow e-sports through relationships and partnerships with players, teams, and event organizers / promoters. For the past year and a half G7 Teams has worked quietly behind the scenes to help make improvements and push all parties involved to improve themselves in order to better the entire industry.

The G7 teams have now come off the first meeting of 2008 in Cologne, Germany at the SK offices where the representatives from Fnatic, mibr, mouse sports, SK, MYM, wnv,PGS and individual Craig Levine gathered for three days to strategize, reorganize, and suit up for another exciting year. Some important changes and plans came out of the meeting and moving forward the idea is to keep the community more informed of what is currently been working on and the status of various projects.

While the G7 teams all have a big long term vision for e-sports and a burning passion to get everyone there, some short term goals were created to tackle immediate needs to strengthen the foundation for future success. The first wave of 2008 projects include:

• Re-building and re-launching the g7teams.com website to serve as a resource to fans, players, teams, and event organizers
• Issuing regular wrap ups (such as this one) with the status of each project
• More frequent interviews with media agencies around the world to participate in a two way dialogue about G7's activities and have them able to directly represent community opinions
• Creating a global calendar of all events (public and private) so that fans know what events are coming up, players and teams can plan their schedules and budgets to maximize their participation in tournaments, and event organizers can be aware of and try to avoid date conflicts with other e-sports activities
• Continuing to work with ZoneRank to ensure their rankings take into account from relevant tournaments, are calculated fairly, and their ranking mechanism is clearly communicated to the community
• Creating an affiliate program to involve and represent the interests of other, non-G7 teams. The response from teams and players needing assistance with missing prize money in 2007 was great. This relationship will be formalized to represent the interest of the players and teams better.
• Exploring creating and planning an annual G7 sanctioned event that will include the tournament of champions with the top teams from the official G7 ranking system (Zonerank.com), community awards show, and celebratory party.
• Evaluating all of the current teams enrollment status and candidate teams
• Reviewing the rules of all major leagues and tournaments and offer suggestions to improve and tighten up their rule set to minimize mid-season rule disputes
• Reviewing, aggregating, and publishing (in a simplified chart) the terms and conditions and policies of each major league and tournament to clearly communicate to the community their policies as it pertains to prize money distribution, media access, player apparel, etc.

The G7 teams are here to help organize and represent the best interest of the community and have a pro-active stance with every team and organizer. On top of that the G7 teams are not looking to dictate to anyone how they should run their business, instead hoping to work collaboratively with them because the G7 going to sink or float with each other's failures and victories.

Alex "TheSlaSH" Mueller of SK Gaming and Craig "Torbull" Levine, the former founder and manager of Team 3D and current co-owner of E-Sports Entertainment have been elected as the two spokespeople for the first half of 2008.

Stay tuned to www.g7teams.com for new site, more information and better communication, and useful information.

The G7 Teams today present two very useful items for teams and players to manage their relationships. The G7 Players Contract and the G7 Appendix.

In a long process, the G7 Teams have reviewed all their individual contracts with players and created the official G7 Players Contract from it. Any team or player in the community shall feel free todownload and use it.

While the contract rules the relationship between the teams and players internally, an appendix was created as well to clarify the legal status externally. The appendix only states that the player mentioned is legally signed by his or her team and states the timeframe for it. This will clarify any upcoming disputes for players to switch teams within their contractual timeframes and help leagues and tournaments to justify such disputes on a solid base.

Any player or team using the Contract or Appendix can count on the G7 Teams to support their efforts in honouring their contracts internally and externally. When using the contract, smaller changes due to regional legal differences might be necessary.

>> Download the official G7 Player Contract(With Insurance) <<

>> Download the official G7 Player Contract(Without Insurance) <<

>> Download the official G7 Appendix(as doc, pdf and interactive pdf) <<

The G7 Teams decided to exclude NiP from their organization, as the founding member of the group is lacking activity not only within the group but in eSports generally. For the flawless process of discussing matters and taking decisions, the G7 Teams have to be highly active and by that push all topics.
After NiP lost all their players and no efforts were taken to rebuild the team, the G7 Teams have discussed the matter and came to point were both, G7 and NiP split their ways.

At ESWC 2007, PGS officially signed up to be one of the G7 Teams. After a long process of building a strong and healthy eSports organisation, combined with the huge success of the team, both sides, G7 Teames and PGS agreed that PGS should be a lively part of the federation.

"The idea of G7 was always to discuss and move forward on eSports relevant topics. PGS has proven to be a major player in competitive gaming and it was a logical step for them to join the G7 and their discussions. Of course we are proud to welcome this organisation as we know them for some time now and their feedback was always more than welcome." Says Alexander T. Mueller, spokesman of the G7 Teams.

< "As the leading force in Poland it is our concern to contribute to the growth of electronic sports worldwide, to elucidate what is behind "esports" and to inspire others to become a part of it. We are delighted to do so in conjunction with the G7 Teams, playing our part in the development of electronic sports" Says Philipp Kasprowicz, Managing Director PGS Gaming

The G7 Teams now are 11 eSports organisations in total.

From the very beginning, one of the most vital points on the G7 Teams agenda has been the formation of a globally recognised ranking system for eSports.

As of 1st July 2007, the rankings provided by Zonerank will become the official system by which the G7 Teams will acknowledge their standings.

After long discussions regarding the system's method of calculation and several disagreements about the weighting of certain criteria, the G7 Teams are finally able to present their official World Ranking - Zonerank.

"We have looked at the pros and cons of established ranking systems and have discussed them internally to ascertain what improvements need to be made to ensure the best and most detailed system possible. After we understood what the calculation method should include, we began our dialogue with Zonerank.

The discussions have been very positive and we are happy that Zonerank accepts our input and are willing to adjust their formula where necessary. The ranking we will see on 1st July is the result of great cooperation." says Alexander T. M?ller, Spokesman for the G7 Teams.

?ot only will the G7 Teams sanction Zonerank as their official World Ranking, but they will also continue to work with Zonerank and become professional team's official representative on the board of Zonerank."

ZoneRank provides a patented method of ranking for professional eSports teams on a monthly basis. Teams and players accumulate points by playing in the most relevant eSports events all around the world, and receive monthly cash prizes on the 1st day of every month based on their ranked position.

"The G7 gathers the pioneer teams of the scene, who essentially founded the professional eSports scene. The G7 organization's role is paramount in promoting the cooperation between all the major parties within the industry. Their input strongly reinforces the relevance of the World eSports Ranking system" Says Jeremie Kletzkine, Business Development Manager of Zonerank.

The G7 teams are aware that there are sometimes problems that arise for teams and players regarding the receiving of prize money pay outs from leagues and tournaments; which can lead to either late payments or no payments at all.

Therefore we are now offering the community the services of the G7 Teams as a united communication channel, in order to approach the organizers of these leagues and tournaments regarding this issue.

If this is the situation for you or your team, we would like to hear from you. All you need to do is send an email with all the details to prizemoney@g7teams.com and we will be taking the issue further from there, whilst keeping you in the loop.

We hope to get as many cases solved as fast as possible using a united voice; however although we will try to do our best we cannot promise a result in every case.

We will be looking to only make any unpaid prize money issues public as a very last measure.

By offering this service to the esports community, we are able to share our experience, having faced the same problems in the past.

The G7 Teams

Cologne, 19th January. For the first time the G7 group will meet in Cologne, Germany this weekend to discuss important topics for the upcoming eSports year 2007.

In order to make further enhancement on the connection with oversea e-sport clubs to be more involved in the tournaments abroad, and to push forward the influence of world e-sport, after consulting in depth with international e-sport professional federation G7, wNv has officially joined G7 today.

"Asking wNv to join G7 was planned from the start on and we are more than proud having them on board as of today." Says Alexander T. Mueller, Spokesperson of G7 and adds: "It is more than important to us getting the input and thoughts of the strongest Asian team into the group."

As the first Asian member in G7 federation, wNv's join not only stands for a huge step forward of G7 federation, but also means far-reaching significance towards Asian e-sport community. The join has marked G7's expansion into Asia. wNv's join will be advantageous to combining the merits and strength of global e-sport clubs, will be beneficial to gathering the resources of universal e-sport clubs to bring world e-sport to a new level and achieve mutual reciprocal and a win-win situation for all of us.

>> Download the official announcement <<

compLexity Syndicate (coL) of the United States and Meet Your Makers (mYm) of Denmark have joined G7 Teams, an international federation of professional electronic-sports teams. coL and mYm join the ranks of 4Kings, Fnatic, MIBR, Mousesports, NiP, SK-Gaming, and Team 3D in G7 Teams, and the G7 Teams will work cooperatively to promote, develop, and grow professional e-sports. compLexity and Meet Your Makers are two of the most well respected and professional e-sports organizations and their addition bolsters G7 Teams as a forum for teams to work with leagues, event organizers, media organizations, and other teams.

>> Download the official announcement <<

This site is aimed at providing in depth information both about electronic-sports in general, as well as all of the G7 activities and initiatives. Some things to look forward to include detailed information regarding current e-sports events, the developement of e-spor s as a sport, and information relating to all member teams.

This site will be a resource to the entire community, where by people can introduce companies, patrons, and potential fans to the sport with accurate and concise information.

>> Download the official announcement <<