Is there any chance of a "corporate deal" between Escape and Voobly? I think this would be the best case scenario for everyone and I'm curious if any communication has been going on or if it's entirely non-negotiable. If it is negotiable, what are the blocking conditions? Would something like "ZeroEmpires presents Masters Regicide sponsored by Escape Gaming" streamed on your personal channel work like Nation's Cup sponsored by SY?
This doesn't work for a few reasons, namely that revenue generated through my personal stream is marked as income to me as an individual. I would then have to pay tax on this and it messes with my personal finances etc. I can't then "donate" that revenue to Escape Gaming, and basically it gets messy and complicated from there.
So far as we've been able to figure out the blocking condition is: "Escape Gaming is a Company", there's no way around that. The bottom line is that we are sponsoring tournaments (no funding from Msft this time), we had the intention to use wololokingdoms and voobly which would have been a benefit for the publicity of both things. But ultimately Voobly are saying we can't use the platform "commercially" while ignoring the fact that nearly every streamer is earning money from Twitch by using the voobly platform to find, play and spectate games.
Of course we're also not going to commit to a full-blown partnership with Voobly because we are actually in a unique position that Microsoft has and will continue to give us prize-pools for future tournaments. It's fairly obvious why we want to keep some kind of neutrality when approaching this. I certainly don't want to lose opportunities for future funding, LANs and all that good stuff.
As for Escape being a company, that's basically the only way we would have been able to secure over $20,000 in prize-pools for 2017. Microsoft aren't going to approach that in any other way, they certainly wouldn't bank transfer that cash to an individual.