Jason Lake: Complexity didn't have the budget for a trophy-winning roster with EliGE

In a recently recorded Ask Me Anything (AMA) video, Complexity owner Jason Lake candidly answered some questions for fans, and addressed the ceiling-altering decision to move on from Jonathan "EliGE" Jablonowski.

According to Lake, Complexity was investing between $1 and $2 million a year with EliGE on the team, below what other teams were willing to spend and below what was necessary to win some trophies. And without a path to trophies, it was hard to convince EliGE to stay.

We love EliGE and would have loved to continue to work with him, but here's the reality of how these things happen. We finished the year kind of on what I would call a down note, I think the Perfect World Shanghai Major was disappointing for everyone. For sure it was disappointing for me.

EliGE isn't getting any younger in his career, and when you get to this point in your career and have the success EliGE has had, money isn't necessarily the biggest motivator. Of course he wants a certain base amount of money for his hard work, but you want to lift trophies.

To lift trophies, you have to invest a tremendous amount of money in your roster. At the time EliGE was on the team, the team was costing us between $1 and $2 million a year, so it's like not we weren't investing. But, when you put that in perspective, there are definitely organizations that were investing significantly more than the couple million we were investing.

During this part of the video, Lake talked about how he doesn't want Complexity to be a "prison" for players, meaning that he doesn't like to hold up players who don't want to be there. He stressed that despite not hoisting the most trophies in Counter-Strike, Complexity takes care of its players and takes pride in the legacy the organization built in esports over the past decades.

The video goes on and Jason Lake revealed he had a very honest conversation with EliGE after the Shanghai Major.

We sat down a couple of times and spent time together, and I was very clear with him that I just don't have the budget to put necessarily the roster together to be hoisting trophies.

With his contract at that time coming up six months later, it was really a moment where we either sell the remainder of that contract and do the right thing by EliGE, or we're like 'No, you're stuck, you're just going to have to do the best for the next six months', and then he leaves for free. I don't think anyone necessarily would win in that scenario.

EliGE would have been somewhere maybe at that point he didn't want to be for six months, we would have had a player that felt that way, and we would have lost one of the best players we've had in the last decade without any monetary compensation on the contract.

So, you look at all those factors and that's why EliGE left.

EliGE was sold to FaZe at the beginning of 2025 and Complexity revamped the roster with Danny "Cxzi" Strzelczyk and Nicholas "nicx" Lee, two up-and-coming players from North America's tier-two scene.

After a string of bad results on tier-one LANs, Complexity have stopped the rot with back-to-back successful campaigns in online qualifiers in both NA and Europe.

The team have won 11 matches in a row and have built some much-needed confidence for the Major Regional Qualifier (MRQ) for the BLAST.tv Austin Major. It's not 100% confirmed Complexity will have to go through the MRQ, but it's the most likely outcome, according to the HLTV live tracker of the Major race.