Rivalry cuts its workforce and pauses play while it reviews its options

Rivalry Corp., a listed betting company that built its name on esports, announced on Friday, February 13, 2026, that its board had approved a significant reduction in operating activity, including a significant cut to its workforce, while it studies what to do with its assets and operations. The Esports Advocate reported the press release the same day.

The company has also paused activity by customers on its platform. For the people who worked there, the announcement follows ten months of strategic review and cost cutting. For esports, it touches an operator that spent years putting teams and community content at the center of its marketing.

The Esports Advocate, April 27, 2023, April 9, 2025 and February 13, 2026. The fall compares the three months to September 30, 2024 with the same period of 2023.

What the board approved

The announcement came in a press release that The Esports Advocate summarized on February 13. Rivalry Corp. said its board of directors had approved a significant reduction in operating activity. The cost cuts take effect immediately, and the company described them as substantial: a significant workforce reduction and reduced operating expenditure.

The reason the board gave was what it called recent performance volatility. In light of it, the board decided to reduce the scale of operations materially while it evaluates whether a strategic deal or another outcome can be advanced. The company describes this as assessing strategic alternatives for its assets and operations, the formal phrase a listed company uses when it is considering a sale, a merger, a restructuring or another change of course.

Rivalry said it was in discussions with third parties about possible transactions. It listed the options under review: transactions at the level of its assets, transactions at the level of the company itself, restructuring initiatives, or other strategic outcomes. It named none of the parties and gave no timetable. It also warned that there was no assurance any of these alternatives would be completed, or that its operations would continue in their current form.

What the release says about staff

The press release speaks of a significant workforce reduction, effective immediately, without giving a number. It does not say how many people the company employed, how many roles are affected, which teams inside the company are concerned or what terms the people leaving are offered.

Staff cuts were already part of the plan a year earlier. When Rivalry opened its strategic review in April 2025, management set out a cost plan that included headcount reductions, according to The Esports Advocate. The February 2026 decision goes further: it pairs the workforce reduction with a pause of the platform itself, which the earlier plan did not.

Until the company publishes more, the scale of the cut and the support given to the people leaving are not on the public record.

A company built around esports

Rivalry Corp. wholly owns Rivalry Limited, which offers regulated online betting on esports, traditional sports and casino games. According to the February 2026 release, as relayed by The Esports Advocate, it holds a license from the Isle of Man and a registration as an internet gaming operator in Ontario, Canada. Its shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange, the Canadian market for smaller companies, under the ticker RVLY.

Esports was not a side line. When it reported the company's results for 2022, The Esports Advocate described Rivalry as an esports-focused betting company and wrote that esports made up almost 90% of the money staked on its sportsbook that year. Millennial and Gen Z customers, in the outlet's account of the same results, accounted for 97% of active users, and the company counted about 1.5 million users by the end of the first quarter of 2023.

Those results also showed the cost of growth. The Esports Advocate reported that revenue for 2022 was a record, up 140% on the year before, while the net loss reached US$22.84 million, up from US$17.84 million in 2021. The same report noted that the company was barred from large markets, among them the United States and the United Kingdom, and that it had obtained a sports bookmaker license from the Northern Territory Racing Commission in Australia in 2022.

Teams and a Dota 2 roster

What set Rivalry apart from most operators was how much of its marketing ran through the competitive scene itself. Its sponsorships, The Esports Advocate wrote in 2023, had moved from Fnatic, which it backed from 2018 to 2021, to 00Nation, a Brazilian Counter-Strike team, and Boom Esports, a Southeast Asian organization, until 2022, and then to a Filipino esports organization as title sponsor from 2023.

In Dota 2, the company went further than a logo on a shirt. Blacklist Rivalry, a Dota 2 team based in Southeast Asia, was formed in December 2022 and run jointly by Rivalry and Blacklist International, a division of Tier One Entertainment. On Tuesday, February 13, 2024, Rivalry, which The Esports Advocate then described as a publicly traded sports and esports betting and media company, announced that the partnership had been extended into 2024 and expanded to include naming rights, the right to put its name in the team's own. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The deal centered on what the partners called creative storytelling and fan-focused activations: meet-and-greets, activations at Dota 2 events and new episodes of UnRivaled, a documentary series that follows the team's competitive journey and gives a behind-the-scenes look at its Southeast Asia-based players.

The year before the cut

The February 2026 decision did not come without warning. On April 9, 2025, The Esports Advocate reported that Rivalry's board had started a formal review of strategic alternatives to maximize long-term stakeholder value, and hired XST Capital Group, which the outlet described as a boutique investment bank, to evaluate the options. The company had at the same time secured a senior unsecured loan of US$650,000 from an existing lender, at 10% interest and due on September 30, 2025. Steven Salz, the company's co-founder and chief executive, called the review a natural step.

The plan management set out then aimed to bring expenses in line with near-term profitability and to stabilize cash flow, through headcount reductions, a consolidation of marketing and new financing. The same report gave the latest quarterly figures, for the three months to September 30, 2024, compared with the same quarter of 2023, in Canadian dollars, with US dollar equivalents beside them. In US dollars, gross gaming revenue fell from US$6.15 million to US$3.99 million and the handle from US$74.45 million to US$56.31 million, while total operating expenses went from US$6.50 million to US$5.97 million.

The handle is the total amount customers staked; gross gaming revenue is what the operator kept after paying out winnings. Both fell faster than costs did. The fall came from the sportsbook, whose gross gaming revenue dropped by CA$3.14 million over the quarter, while the casino side of the business posted modest gains, according to the same report. Net revenue for the quarter, which also deducts promotional costs, dropped by more than CA$1 million to CA$2.95 million (US$2.08 million), and net revenue over the first nine months of 2024 came to about CA$12.11 million, down by more than CA$1.1 million.

Ten months separate the opening of the review, in April 2025, from the announcement of February 13, 2026. The February release still describes the company as assessing its strategic alternatives, which means the review begun with XST Capital Group had not ended in a deal when the board decided to cut back.

What comes next for customers and staff

The release sets out two immediate effects for customers. Player activity on the platform is paused, so no new betting is taking place, and the company said it is facilitating withdrawals in the ordinary course of business, meaning customers can still take out the money held in their accounts. It gave no date for a resumption of activity.

For the company, the next steps depend on the talks with third parties it describes, and on which of the four routes it listed, if any, comes to a conclusion. It has said only that it is assessing them, not that any of them has been chosen.

For the staff concerned, the open questions are the ones the company has not answered in public: how many people were affected, whether any roles remain, and what support is offered. For teams and creators that worked with Rivalry, the release says nothing about existing partnerships. What it does say is that the operator that put its name on a Dota 2 team has paused its own activity while its board decides its future.

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