RENNSPORT is still running cash-prize esports, developing new content, operating across PC and consoles and now self-publishing on every platform. Meanwhile, its visible Steam audience is remarkably small. The €10,000 R1 prize pool is not really the mystery. Everything around it is. RENNSPORT is in an unusual position. At the time of writing, SteamDB showed RENNSPORT with just 20 concurrent players, a 24-hour peak of 25 and an all-time Steam peak of only 306. At the same time, RENNSPORT has started another season of R1, its flagship esports championship, culminating in an in-person final at SimRacing Expo with a €10,000 prize pool split across 12 teams. That leaves one obvious question: who is still paying for all of this? The €10,000 is not the strange part Ten thousand euros is not an extraordinary amount of money in the marketing budget of a commercial video game. On its own, it tells us very little. RENNSPORT also comes from an era when the numbers involved in its esports programme were dramatically larger. When ESL R1 launched in 2023, ESL FACEIT Group officially announced a collective €500,000 prize pool across that year’s two seasons. RENNSPORT’s tournament at the 2025 Esports World Cup carried a $500,000 prize pool. Those figures should not be interpreted as Competition Company personally writing a €500,000 or $500,000 cheque. Those competitions were part of much larger externally backed esports operations. R1 in 2026 is different. The current series sits directly inside the RENNSPORT ecosystem and its prize fund has fallen to €10,000. That is dramatically less money, but it arrives while the sim’s publicly visible Steam audience remains exceptionally small. The prize fund is therefore interesting, even if it is probably one of the cheapest parts of the operation. Running RENNSPORT costs more than €10,000 RENNSPORT is more than