Rocket League team items: how the RLCS Shop and bundles pay teams

When a fan in Rocket League puts a team's logo on the roof of a car, part of the price can travel back to that team. That link between a cosmetic purchase and an organization's income is a revenue line that sits inside the game itself, beside sponsorship and prize money. It has changed shape several times since it first appeared.

Rocket League is a game of soccer played with rocket-powered cars, usually three against three. Psyonix, the studio that makes it, sells items that change how a car looks and nothing about how it plays. Some of those items carry the colors of teams in the Rocket League Championship Series, the official circuit known as the RLCS. This guide explains how those team items have paid: the Esports Shop opened in 2019 with its own currency and a fixed share for organizations, the move to a single currency in 2025, the RLCS Shop that replaced it, and the event bundles of 2026, starting with the Paris Major Bundle that goes on sale today, May 19.

Psyonix announcements of April 10, 2019 and May 11, 2026.

What a team item is

A team item is a cosmetic object that shows the identity of an esports organization: its logo, its colors, sometimes its name. In Rocket League, the most common form is the decal, a paint design laid over the body of a car. Wheels, banners shown beside a player's name and goal explosions, the visual effect that plays when a player scores, have all been made in team versions.

These items sit alongside the rest of the game's cosmetics, which Psyonix sells through its own shops for an in-game currency that players buy with real money. What sets a team item apart is that it borrows an organization's brand. That is why the organization has a claim on what it earns, and why Psyonix has published, at each stage, how that money is shared.

There are two distinct models in the announcements. The first is the permanent team item: an organization's own decal or wheels, sold in a dedicated part of the game, with a share of each sale going to that organization. The second is the event bundle: a set of items tied to one tournament rather than to one team, whose proceeds are divided among every team and player taking part. The first rewards an organization for its brand; the second rewards competitors for their results.

The 2019 pilot: an Esports Shop

The first model began with a pilot. Psyonix announced on April 10, 2019 that a Rocket League Esports Shop would open on April 16, 2019, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time, reached from the game's main menu under the Shop heading.

Eleven organizations took part, listed by the studio in alphabetical order: Cloud9, Dignitas, Evil Geniuses, G2 Esports, Ghost Gaming, mousesports, NRG Esports, Rogue, Splyce, TSM and Team Vitality. Each team had the same set of items: two decals, one for the Octane car body and one for the Dominus, one player banner and a range of wheels.

The shop worked on rotation rather than as a full catalog. Six items were featured each day, the selection refreshed at noon Pacific time, and each item carried a timer showing how long it would stay. Some items remained for 24 hours and others for 48, after which a new item took their place.

Every item bought there was classed as Premium, and Psyonix wrote that Premium items could not be traded to another player. A fan who bought a team decal kept it in their own inventory: the pilot left no route for the item to change hands between players after the sale.

Esports Tokens and their price

The pilot came with a currency of its own. Items in the Esports Shop could be bought only with Esports Tokens, a currency used inside the game and nowhere else, sold in four packs. Psyonix gave the prices in US dollars, or the regional equivalent.

Shop items started at 100 Esports Tokens, the price of the smallest pack. The tokens themselves were non-tradable and could be spent only in the Esports Shop, which kept the team catalog apart from the rest of the game's economy. The larger packs lowered the price of each token slightly, from 99 cents per hundred in the smallest pack to about 80 cents in the largest.

The pilot thus ran as a closed circuit: a currency bought with real money, spendable only on esports items, in a shop whose catalog was made of team items. That closed circuit is the setting of the revenue share described next.

The 30 percent rule

The heart of the 2019 model was one sentence in the announcement: "All organizations participating in the Esports Shop pilot program will receive 30% of the revenue." It set a fixed share, the same for every team in the pilot, rather than a negotiated fee.

The announcement does not set out the base of that 30 percent in more detail, such as whether taxes or platform fees came off first, and it gives no figure for what the pilot earned. It also gives no payment schedule. What it fixes is the principle: an organization whose items were in the shop received a share of what those items brought in.

As a worked illustration of the percentage alone, every 100 units of revenue from a team's items would send 30 to the organization under that rule. The real sums depend on how many items are sold, and no announcement read here publishes them.

Six years later, the share was still described the same way. Writing in March 2025, Esports Insider presented the RLCS Shop as part of a revenue-share model Psyonix first introduced in 2019, under which 30 percent of the revenue generated by an item goes to the esports organization it represents. The same report counted more than 30 teams then featured, among them G2 Esports, Gen.G and Team Vitality, against the eleven of the pilot.

The players' share

The 2019 pilot did not stop at organizations. Psyonix wrote that a portion of the revenue from items sold in the Esports Shop would also go to players, through an addition to the prize pool of RLCS League Play, the regular season of the circuit at the time, in North America and Europe.

Two details of that rule stand out. The players' share did not depend on their organization being in the pilot: a player in North American or European League Play benefited whether or not their team had items on sale. And the studio limited it to those two regions, saying that participation of Oceania and South America in the revenue share would be addressed in future seasons.

The announcement gives no percentage for the players' portion. The two flows were therefore of different kinds. The organization's share was tied to its own items and fixed at 30 percent. The players' share was pooled across a whole league and paid through prize money, so it reached players by results rather than by the popularity of one team's decal.

2025: one currency for every shop

The second stage came with a change of currency. On March 21, 2025, Psyonix announced that Esports Tokens would be replaced with Credits, the currency already used in the game's main Item Shop, and stopped selling Esports Tokens that day. From April 22, 2025, at 4 p.m. Pacific time, Credits became the only in-game currency for virtual purchases in both the Item Shop and the esports shop.

Players who still held Esports Tokens did not lose them. The conversion followed three steps, set out in the announcement and repeated in the patch notes of version 2.51, published on April 22.

The arithmetic of the example holds: 1,200 Tokens at 0.9881 give a little under 1,186 Credits, the 10 percent boost brings that to a little over 1,304, and rounding up to the nearest 50 gives 1,350. The patch notes stated plainly that Esports Tokens had been removed with version 2.51.

The change ended the closed circuit of 2019. Team items were now bought with the same Credits as every other cosmetic, while the esports catalog kept its own tab in the game's menus.

The RLCS Shop and its universal decals

The same update renamed the shop. From April 22, 2025, the Esports Shop tab became the RLCS Shop, and with Esports Tokens removed, its items were bought with Credits.

Its first content brought a new kind of team item. Until then, a team decal fitted one car body, which is why the 2019 pilot had made two of them per team. The 2025 items were universal decals, which Psyonix described as the first ever based on RLCS teams: they can be fitted to any car body except certain bodies based on third-party brands. Each team also received a Takeover Goal Explosion. The patch notes priced the universal decal at 300 Credits per team and the goal explosion at 800 Credits per team.

The patch notes list twelve teams, each with a 2025 decal and a 2025 goal explosion, drawn from all seven regions of the circuit.

Set beside the 2019 list, the table shows how far the model had spread: the pilot had eleven organizations and no regional grouping, while the first RLCS Shop content had at least one team from every region of the circuit. Neither the March announcement nor the patch notes state a revenue share. The 30 percent figure for 2025 rests on the Esports Insider report of March 25, 2025, which presents it as the model then in place.

Event bundles: the Paris Major

The second model, the event bundle, is the one in the news this week. A Major is one of the international events of the RLCS season. In its guide to the Paris Major, published on May 14, Psyonix wrote that 16 teams would play at La Défense Arena from May 20 to 24 for RLCS points and a share of the US$354,000 prize pool, and that all net sales of the limited-time Paris Major Bundle would go directly to the players and teams competing.

The bundle itself was set out in a Psyonix announcement of May 11. It holds the Shot Caller Decal, the Heat Lightning Wheels, the Slay Maker Boost, the trail a car leaves when it accelerates, and a player anthem called Surge. It costs 1,000 Credits and is on sale from May 19 through May 30, so the sale runs on for six days after the final on May 24.

The base of the payout is defined in the announcement: "Net sales are the proceeds after taxes, payment processing, and console platform fees are covered." Those net sales are divided equally between two pools, one for players and one for teams, and the announcement sets no upper limit on either.

The player pool, half of net sales, is split equally across three statistical awards. The Striker goes to the player with the highest average goals per game, the Playmaker to the highest average assists per game, and the Savior to the player with the most saves per goal allowed. The team pool, the other half, is shared among the 16 teams by final placement, in shares the announcement prints in full.

The gaps between places are small. The winner and the runner-up receive the same share, 10 percent of the team pool each, and a team placed 13th to 16th still receives 4.5 percent, close to half the winner's share. Because the team pool is half of net sales, the winner's 10 percent amounts to 5 percent of the bundle's net sales, and each team in the last four places receives 2.25 percent. The prize pool of the same Major works differently: it is a fixed sum, while the bundle money depends entirely on how many fans buy it.

The announcement also says that a World Championship bundle will follow later this year with a sharing model that supports the players and teams taking part. It gives no details of that model yet.

Two models side by side

The permanent team item and the event bundle answer different questions. One asks which brand a fan wants to show; the other asks how a tournament's audience can add to what its competitors earn.

For an organization, the team item works like merchandise: under the 30 percent rule, its share follows the sales of its own items, and the rule says nothing about results. The event bundle works like prize money: it pays by placement, and the Paris split covers only the 16 teams at the event. A team can, in principle, earn from both in the same month, from its own items in the RLCS Shop and from its finish at a Major.

For players, the two models also differ. Under the 2019 rule, players reached item money only through a pooled prize addition in two regions. Under the Paris Major Bundle, half of every sale goes to players, but only to the three who win the statistical awards.

How this sits beside other games

Rocket League is not the only game to share cosmetic sales with teams, and the comparison helps place its numbers. Riot Games, which runs the Valorant Champions Tour, known as the VCT, sells team capsules, bundles of items in one team's colors. Its team capsules went on sale on January 13, 2026, at 2,320 VP, the game's currency, or 1,650 VP for players who already owned the same team's 2024 or 2025 capsule. In the same announcement, Riot wrote that it shared US$100 million with VCT teams in 2025.

Those are Riot's rules for its own circuit and do not carry over to Rocket League. What the comparison shows is the range of choices a publisher has: the base of the share, whether it rewards a brand or a result, and whether players are included. Psyonix has used two of those choices at different times, and in the Paris Major Bundle it has combined a placement split for teams with awards for players.

What the announcements leave open

Every figure Psyonix has published on team items is a rule, not a result. The 2019 announcement fixed 30 percent for organizations without saying what the pilot earned. The 2025 announcements changed the currency and the shop without restating a share. The May 11 announcement prints the Paris split in full but cannot print an amount, because the amount depends on sales that close on May 30.

Some points therefore remain with the parties themselves. How often an organization is paid its share, and whether it passes any of it to its players, is not stated in Psyonix's announcements and depends on each team's own arrangements. How the World Championship bundle will be shared is still to be announced. And no announcement gives a full, current list of the teams with items in the RLCS Shop.

What is settled is the mechanism. In Rocket League, a cosmetic item can pay a competitor in two ways: as a share of the sales of one team's own items, or as a share of an event bundle divided by placement and awards. Both depend on what fans choose to buy, and in both cases the rules of the division are published before the sale opens.

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