Esports Team Manager

Esports Team Manager puts the player in charge of a professional roster inside a fictional MOBA called Aurebella, drafting from over 80 champions, hiring a full support staff, chasing sponsorships, and playing through full competitive seasons. It's a full release, not Early Access, from small studio The Brain Trust, launched on 8 December 2025 for Windows at $9.99.

A draft phase reviewers say lacks the information to actually draft

The single most consistent complaint across the review sample is that the game's core decision-making moment, the champion draft, doesn't give players enough information to make an informed choice. One detailed review lays it out directly: "you have no idea which champions are good or bad, there is no tab to for example check the win rates and ban rates for the champions. You're just guessing in the draft." A separate, shorter review reaches the identical conclusion from a different angle: "no real details on which champs your players are good/bad with. The ban/pick phase is just a mess, you might as well just click whoever you want to ban/pick without much thought around counters or synergies." For a genre built specifically around the tension of drafting and countering an opponent, both reviewers describe that tension as effectively absent from the game as shipped.

A match presentation several reviewers call too thin

Beyond the draft, reviewers report that actually watching a match play out offers very little. "The actual match is just a few text prompts which appear and then a Win/Lose outcome," one reviewer writes, and another describes something similar with an unsettling detail: "the match result is very lacking as well.. It's just a line that's forming with a bunch of text on top giving you the key moments of the match and the result afterwards in like 20 seconds. And considering that i got an achievement for winning a match right after entering it after draft, the results are predetermined." That specific observation, that a match's outcome may already be decided before it visually plays out, is a serious claim about the game's actual mechanical depth, one that, if accurate, would explain why several reviewers feel their draft and strategic decisions don't meaningfully affect what happens next.

Missing tutorials, and a comparison to an even earlier competitor

A recurring secondary complaint is that Esports Team Manager doesn't explain its own systems. "The lack of tutorials makes it challenging to learn how to manage the team," one reviewer writes, "then after 2 signings I wasn't able to make more. I have no clue if that is a feature because its not written anyways." Another reviewer makes a specific, pointed comparison that stings more than a generic complaint would: comparing this full release unfavorably to "Moba Esports manager," a different, ultimately unreleased competing project, at what they describe as only a 0.7 version, "it had waay more features while being at 0.7 version and looked way better UI wise." Whether or not that specific comparison is fair to every detail, the underlying point, that this shipped as a 1.0 release with less apparent depth than reviewers expected from a full-price launch, is echoed across nearly the entire sample.

One committed fan, and a real, if narrow, defense

Against that weight of criticism, one reviewer with nearly 40 hours logged offers a genuinely positive take, and it's worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as an outlier. "Realistic concept. based on previous format of LOL. draft/ban is solid," they write, going on to offer specific, constructive feedback: fixing balance patches that seem to punish only the most popular champions, adding contract negotiation before a player's deal expires, and giving generated players more name variety. They close by saying plainly, "I still recommend this as this game really tries to put you in the shoes of a coach/manager of a esports team. Good job!" That's a meaningfully different read from the rest of the sample, and Steam's achievement data offers a small clue why: one achievement sits at 56.2% completion while every other sits below 10%, suggesting most players who try the game complete an early milestone and then largely stop engaging, exactly the pattern you'd expect if the mid-to-late game doesn't hold attention for most of its audience even as it clearly held it for at least one.

A staffing and sponsorship layer the sample barely mentions

Beyond the draft and the match itself, Esports Team Manager also asks the player to build out a front office: a head coach, an assistant coach, a content creator, an analyst, and a general manager, each presumably shaping the team in some way, alongside sponsorship deals meant to fund the operation across a full season. None of the four reviews in the sample dwell on this layer in any detail, which is itself worth noting, since it suggests these systems either work quietly enough in the background not to draw comment, or simply don't register as consequential next to the draft and match complaints that dominate every review instead. The one reviewer who logged the most time, and who offers the most constructive feedback of the sample, focuses their suggestions specifically on staff variety (more distinct generated names, a stat guide for staff roles) rather than on removing anything, which at least implies the framework is sound even if its presentation isn't yet pulling its weight.

Final verdict

Esports Team Manager has a real, workable concept underneath its problems, a MOBA-flavored season structure that at least one dedicated player finds genuinely compelling, but the weight of its small early review sample describes a game whose most important system, the draft, doesn't give players enough information to engage with meaningfully, and whose matches resolve with too little visible substance behind them. At $9.99, it's a hard sell today for anyone but the genre's most patient, forgiving fans, and a clearer candidate for revisiting later if the specific, actionable feedback reviewers are already offering gets addressed.