A ‘Fortnite’ player’s lawsuit against his own team is taking on the ‘Wild West’ of esports

In the young and lucrative world of video game streaming, few groups are as popular as FaZe Clan. And few streamers are as popular as Turney Tenney, 21, who goes by Tfue.

Tenney has 10 million YouTube followers and regularly draws more than 10 million viewers each month to watch him play “Fortnite,” the multiplayer survival video game that has taken over the gaming and esports world in the past few years.

With that kind of popularity comes sponsorships and brand deals that industry experts think have made him and the FaZe Clan millions of dollars.

But just last spring, Tenney was just another anonymous streamer — until he was invited to join FaZe Clan, an esports group that houses and builds teams with some of the biggest names in esports.

Now, Tenney and FaZe are embroiled in a very public lawsuit over how the money he generates is divided, a battle that shines a light on what esports lawyer Andrew Gordon calls “the Wild West.”

Gordon compared the esports streaming industry to the early days of baseball before players unionized, when team owners had all the bargaining power.

“When you’re a new guy that has no followers, what are you going to demand?” Gordon said.

Tenney’s suit has caught the Internet’s attention, generating its own hashtag (#ReleaseTheContract), plenty of tweetstorms and some long YouTube video explanations.

But behind the drama is a larger story: a labor dispute in a burgeoning and largely unregulated $1.1 billion industry ripe with questionable contracts agreed to by people who often aren’t yet of legal drinking age.

On Monday, Tenney filed a complaint in a California district court against FaZe Clan alleging the company is violating California’s Talent Agency Act, and calling the contract he signed with the group in 2018 that he has since tried to leave “grossly oppressive, onerous, and one-sided.”

In the suit, Tenney alleges that the “Gamer Agreement” the two parties signed entitled FaZe Clan to a finder’s fee of up to 80 percent of the revenue paid by third-parties to associate themselves with Tenney.

“Until now, FaZe Clan has enjoyed the fruits of this illegal business model with impunity because no one could…