[Update] Capcom, NetherRealms, and Bandai Namco Pull Out of Evo 2020 Amid Sexual Abuse Scandal

Published: July 2, 2020 9:15 PM /

By:


Joey Cuellar Evo

Update: Shortly after this news article went live, Evo has announced that they will be canceling Evo Online. In addition to this, Joey Cuellar is being removed from the company entirely and Tony Cannon will be taking over as CEO. Evo will be refunding everyone who purchased a bad, and in addition, will be donating the equivalent of the proceeds to Project Hope.

You can read the original news article below.


Capcom, NetherRealm Studios, Bandai Namco, and Mane6 have announced that they will be pulling their games out of popular fighting game tournament Evo 2020. This would include Street Fighter V, Mortal Kombat 11, Soul Calibur VI, Tekken 7, Them's Fightin' Herds and more. Additionally, popular professional gamer SonicFox has announced he'll also not be attending. This news comes after earlier today when Evo president Joey Cuellar, who often goes by the name "Mr. Wizard," was placed on paid administrative leave following accusations of sexual abuse towards minors.

The story originally came about from Twitter user @pyronlkari made a post on Twitlonger. In this post he detailed Cuellar paying him and other young boys to take off their clothes.

Wizard was especially into this. He would pay people hundreds of tokens to do things like take off their clothes and jump in the water hazard pools for certain amounts of times. 99% of the time, it was young boys. There is only a singular instance I know of where it wasn't a young boy, and that singular instance, she was allowed to do it in the future, in whatever clothes she liked and only for a few seconds. But for all the boys (out of recollection 12-16) it was like 10-15 minutes, we HAD to be in our underwear (under the reasoning that it would be colder) and they were always challenges at the time so we couldn't prepare change of clothes, towel, or anything like that.

We were teenagers with no money and 100-200 tokens (20-40$ worth of tokens) was a lot. So almost all of us did it without a second thought. "Jump in a pool for 10 minutes for 40$? Hell yeah!". We never really thought of it in a predatory way.

He then specifically talked about how, when he was 17 years old, Cuellar paid him $20 to see his exposed genitals. Cuellar took to Twitter not to deny the claims, but say that he was sorry for the harm he caused, and that he was "young and reckless and did things I'm not proud of." He is currently on paid administrative leave while Evo investigates the claims further.

With the three biggest fighting game companies pulling out of Evo 2020, it seems very likely the whole event will be canceled. The physical show was already canceled and reduced to an online tournament earlier this year.

We'll continue to update this story as more news reaches us.

How do you feel about these three companies pulling out? Feel other companies should as well? Let us know in the comments below.

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


Samuel Guglielmo TechRaptor
| Reviews Editor

I'm Sam. I have been playing video games since my parents brought home a PlayStation whenever that came out. Started writing for TechRaptor for 2016 and,… More about Samuel