ENCE are shutting down. The board of ENCE eSports Oy has decided to file for bankruptcy, the Finnish organization announced on Monday, 13 years after it entered Counter-Strike and seven years after it played in a Major final. The company’s own accounts show losses of €680,000 in 2024 and €940,000 in 2025.
ENCE posted the news on X under the heading “The end of an era”. The short statement thanked players, staff, partners and fans, and ended with “GG”. It gave no reason for the decision and did not say what happens to the players and staff still under contract.
Out of the blue for the players
The decision appears to have come without warning for the team. joeski, who signed a permanent deal with ENCE only a month ago, wrote that the news “came out of the blue” and that it was “very disappointing as we just got stuff rolling as a team”.
HENU called it “super sad times” and added that he hoped for “some good news soon”. Head coach allu, who returned to the organization in June, wrote that he was heartbroken and would explain more about himself and the team “when the dust settles a bit”.
Two days before the announcement, allu and HENU were signing autographs and playing 1v1s with fans at an electronics store in Vantaa, an event ENCE had promoted on X for a week.
ENCE’s last lineup:
Schwarz (in-game leader)
teme- millert
- HENU
- joeski
- allu (coach)
The team is 103rd in Valve’s Regional Standings. Its last match was a 0-2 semifinal loss to Phantom at Elisa BreakOut Series #2 on October 17, and two days later ENCE released kRaSnaL, the last player left from the international lineup it benched in March.
The money ran out after 2023
The annual accounts of Ence Esports Oy, filed in the Finnish Trade Register and listed by Finder, show how quickly things turned. Revenue more than tripled from 2021 to 2023, then fell by almost 80 percent in two years.
| Year | Revenue (€) | Result (€) | Staff |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2,040,000 | +168,000 | 21 |
| 2022 | 4,072,000 | +906,000 | 23 |
| 2023 | 6,314,000 | +331,000 | 23 |
| 2024 | 3,153,000 | -680,000 | 23 |
| 2025 | 1,322,000 | -940,000 | 18 |
The peak came in 2023, the year ENCE won IEM Dallas and sold the core of that team to Falcons. The accounts do not show how much of the revenue came from transfer fees. What they do show is that the organization lost €1.62 million over the next two years, and that 2025 ended with revenue below the level of 2021.
From an all-Finnish Major final to Dallas
ENCE entered Counter-Strike in April 2013, when the organization signed the TOOMUCHVIDEOGAMES roster. The breakthrough came five years later. In April 2018 ENCE built a lineup around allu with Aleksib as in-game leader, sergej, Aerial and xseveN, an all-Finnish team.
Within six months they had won StarSeries & i-League Season 6. In March 2019 they reached the final of the IEM Katowice Major, where they lost 2-0 to Astralis, and two months later they beat the same Astralis 2-0 in the BLAST Pro Series Madrid final. “EZ4ENCE” became a chant far outside Finland.
ENCE3-2Vega SquadronStarSeries & i-League Season 6 final, October 2018
Astralis2-0ENCEIEM Katowice Major 2019 finalENCE2-0AstralisBLAST Pro Series Madrid 2019 final
ENCE2-0
MOUZIEM Dallas 2023 finalENCE3-1
HEROICElisa Masters Espoo 2024 finalThe Finnish era ended when Aleksib was benched after the 2019 Berlin Major. The second peak came with an international team built in 2021 around Snappi, dycha and Spinx, with sAw as coach. That side reached the semifinals of the PGL Major Antwerp 2022, and in June 2023 Snappi, dycha, NertZ, SunPayus and maden beat MOUZ 2-0 to win IEM Dallas. They followed it with finals at IEM Cologne and Gamers8 that summer.
The CS2 years
Counter-Strike 2 arrived in September 2023, and within three months most of the Dallas team was gone. Snappi and sAw left in November, maden and SunPayus were sold to Falcons in December, and NertZ moved to HEROIC. ENCE brought in gla1ve as in-game leader, with Goofy, Kylar and hades from 9INE.
That team reached the quarterfinals of IEM Katowice 2024, where it lost 2-1 to Falcons, and qualified for the PGL Major Copenhagen 2024. It went out in the Opening Stage, and that was ENCE’s last Major. The team missed the Shanghai and Austin Majors in the qualifiers, and did not reach the Cologne Major either.
The last big trophy came in October 2024. gla1ve, sdy, podi, xKacpersky and Neityu beat HEROIC 3-1 in the final of Elisa Masters Espoo 2024 on home soil. After that, the results came mostly from second-tier events: CCT and Thunderpick World Championship series titles in 2025, a final at YaLLa Compass Qatar and an early exit at ESL Pro League Season 22 in October 2025, ENCE’s last tier-one event.
In March 2026 ENCE benched its international lineup and said it would rebuild around Finnish players. “Our goal is clear: to bring Finnish Counter-Strike back onto the international stage,” the organization wrote. A month later the academy team was promoted to the main roster, and the players from the old lineup were sold one by one: xKacpersky to Ninjas in Pyjamas, Neityu to FaZe, podi to FOKUS. CEO Mika Kuusisto stepped down in June after more than seven years in the job.
The young Finnish team, with an average age of 20.5, won two Elisa Open Suomi titles in the spring but went out in the open qualifier for PGL Masters Bucharest in September.
More than Counter-Strike
ENCE’s name also carried weight outside CS. In StarCraft II, Joona “Serral” Sotala played under the ENCE tag and became the first non-Korean to win the WCS Global Finals in 2018, one of the biggest results in the game’s history.
“We gave it all we had”
Kuusisto, who still sits on the board, was among the first to respond.
Former players and rival organizations followed within the hour. dycha, who spent three and a half years with the team, wrote that he had “a lot of good memories” with ENCE, and hades, who played for the organization twice, posted “End of an era”. xKacpersky, the last player ENCE sold, answered with a broken heart.
HAVU, Finland’s other big CS organization, called ENCE “the org that put Finnish CS on the world map”. PARIVISION wrote “EZ4ENCE4EVER”, and FNATIC, 100 Thieves, Eternal Fire and FUT posted their own short tributes. Thunderpick, which runs the Thunderpick World Championship, wrote that it would not be “‘ez’ to forget ENCE”.
What happens to the players and allu’s coaching staff is not yet clear. ENCE has not said whether the contracts end with the bankruptcy, and allu has promised a longer statement in the coming days.
