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The GameGune organisation has issued a statement to address the comments made about the spectator issue.

"First of all, the title misquotes blatantly our words. Nobody from the organization said that and the only thing you will get writing this is making people think that GameGune is a tournament that does not give a damn about spectators, and that´s not even close to the truth.

"The article is not sincere about what really happened. The schedule that ORG people sent to the press before the tournament is approximate and everybody knows that. If everything goes better than expected (which is what happened), and a match can start earlier, so it will. For us, the most important thing is to take care of players. Our goal is that when the tournament is over they are happy with the organization and the facilities, so they will repeat next year and tell everyone about us. If we were such a bad organization as the article seems to imply, teams would never come to our tournament year after year. You can ask every single team of the tournament if they have had any problem with org people, computers or schedules.

"We´ve always asked every participant about their opinion in order to improve and that made us what we are now.  I know that advancing matches is not good for spectators and I want to apologise for the inconvenience we may have caused. But, as I said, it´s not true that we don’t care about spectators. From the very first match of the first group, HLTVs are up and running. We have every demo of every match recorded. We have all POV demos recorded. We also have server logs to do statistics with your website program. So, happily I can say that, the only problem in the tournament has been this 30 minutes of advancing the match. This could have been fixed if HLTV.org people had talked to ORG people right after the previous match and had asked when the next match was going to start rather than just writing down what the approximate schedule said.

"To sum up, GameGune ORG is sorry for the inconvenience we may have caused, and we invite everyone to come to Bilbao and see how things are run here and how teams feel about the organization. Players would rather have an earlier start. We care about them because they are the single most important part of the tournament, because without them, there is no GameGune."

From HLTV.org, we would like to apologize if our piece damaged in some way the image of the GameGune event in the community. We have worked with GameGune for many years and established a good relationship with them, and we hope it will continue like that. However, we feel it was our obligation to report on words which, despite probably not having been fully thought out, were still produced.