A notorious Nazi symbol recently made waves in the esports (electronic sports) community when a team used it as their logo in a tournament. AnimeVesta, a team based in Mongolia, used the Sturmabteilung (SA) logo to represent them, a symbol also used by Hitler’s Brownshirts, a paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, prior to his ascendance to power in Germany. The symbol is still used by many neo-Nazis in lieu of a swastika to signal their ideology.
The tournament, called the MESA Invitational 2024, was held from December 10-15, 2024, with a prize pool of $100,000. Tournament participants were playing Dota 2, a 5 vs. 5 format online multiplayer game developed by Valve Corporation, which also developed the video game storefront Steam (where Dota 2 is hosted), which regularly platforms extremist content.
Reddit users were quick to recognize and ridicule the symbol’s use, questioning whether tournament organizers “check new/unknown teams for this kind of stuff,” calling it a “nasty phenomenon.” The social media posts created a backlash against MESA, leading to AnimeVesta removing their logo. However, this enforcement came too late, as the symbol had already reached thousands watching gameplay, including archives of the tournament on YouTube. The video-hosting platform has historically allowed videos with hateful content and imagery to proliferate transnationally and in different languages, including several instances of extremist content related to gaming. Previous investigations by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) revealed extremist groups such as the Patriot Youth, which identifies closely with the white nationalist Patriot Front movement, sharing hateful content in the online multiplayer video game Roblox, Austrian Identitarian game studio Kvltgames, and content showcasing far-right conspiracist Alex Jones’ hateful video game NWO Wars all platformed, and in some cases, monetized, by YouTube.
Noticeably absent from Steam’s Online Conduct rules are rules addressing the proliferation of hateful ideologies and extremism, which, if included and enforced, could have prevented this situation from arising.
The black and white Sturmabteilung logo, used by tournament participants, is plastered across the Dota 2 map. (Source: YouTube)
The Sturmabteilung, top left, is prominent on a YouTube video thumbnail showing footage from the tournament (Source: YouTube)
AnimeVesta issued an official response to their use of the hateful symbol, saying: “We, AnimeVesta, wish to sincerely apologize for the use of a logo that inadvertently resembled a symbol historically linked to hate and violence. In our efforts to find a suitable design for our team, we discovered a logo that appeared to be free of copyright, but we did not recognize its connection to the SA symbol.”
Esports is a rapidly growing industry, tracing its roots back to the early 1970s and reaching the global stage under the “esports” moniker in the early 2000s. Esports has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, with international revenue projected to reach $4.3 billion in 2024. With gaming alarmingly used as a method by the far right to stoke hatred and recruit new members into their movements, often culminating in real world organization, esport tournament organizers, video game vendors, and video game developers must take online extremism more seriously and be proactive in preventing its already rapid spread.
