GosuGamers have reported on the demise of EnVyUs, the "first NA Overwatch team to get sponsored".

The team originally gained notoriety as Hubris before being picked up at their peak during the end of Phase 1 of the Closed Beta. Roster issues plagued the team after their acquisition, results suffered and they seemed unable to recapture the original magic.

Although no official announcement has been forthcoming from the EnVyUs organisation yet, team captain Ronnie "Talespin" DuPree Jr. took to Reddit to set the record straight and shed some light on what had been going on in the locker room:

"Well, we weren't really prepared to announce this yet, but here's the story.

Over the past month or two we've been trying to find a 6th player we are happy with and trying out a different player every couple weeks kind of set us back a lot because we had to shuffle other players positions on the team to fit them in. We haven't been performing as well as we would've liked but out of the three gosugamers cups we played in we won two of them and placed third in the other and consistently did well against other top teams in scrims; it wasn't that bad. We were confident that once found a 6th player that really fit we could start to contend for the top spot again.

Unfortunately, after trying out Jkw for only a week or so we didn't feel like we were prepared to take on LG/C9 on some payload maps so we decided to try and ban some of them and take the games to KOTH. It was a strategy we haven't done before and didn't pan out very well which led to a disappointing result but it wasn't entirely unexpected. We were thinking long-term and didn't really take the loss too hard but the following day we received a message from Ras saying he was going to quit.

According to Ras, he couldn't bring himself to play the game outside of scrims and practice other heroes and felt like he was holding us back so he wanted to step down. I'm not putting the blame on Ras, hes a good player that put everything into the matches, it just made it a difficult situation when we were already trying to find one player to round out the roster then all of a sudden we had to find two. It was kind of the final nail in the coffin. At the same time I got offered to join another team so after thinking about it I decided to accept the offer instead of spending another month or two trying to rebuild a roster with no promises of how it would turn out. It was at the point where each player had to decide what was best for themselves.

Mike (hastro) and everyone else at Envyus has been great to us and has supported us the entire time. We appreciate everything they've done and for all the fans supporting us along the way. Envyus is a great team and I'm confident we haven't seen the last of them in Overwatch as they are huge fans of the game. We may be splitting up for now but most of us plan to remain in the competitive scene on different teams."

The most recent EnVyUs Overwatch roster was:

  • Matt "coolmatt69" Iorio
  • John "Minstrel" Fisher
  • Michael "Ras" Penna
  • Faaraz "Stoop" Waris
  • Ronnie "Talespin" DuPree Jr.
  • Joey "Jkw" Wavering

Note that with EnVyUs bowing out, a vacancy has opened up in the lucrative $5000 Overkill Beta League which is currently expected to be filled by Grouchy Desperados.