Stickers delayed as Valve makes players re-draw signatures at Major

Stickers, for the first time ever, have been delayed so far to the point where they were not released before the start of the 2024 PGL Copenhagen Major. At first, fans pointed to the delay as being due to 9Pandas having to be replaced at the last minute. However, once the Major started and all teams accounted for, the stickers were still not released.

The delay was massively confusing to fans, but now we've learned that the reason for the delay was that Valve was making all players suspected of having help in creating their signature physically re-do them while at the Major, ECSTATIC co-owner Oliver "zipeL" Behrensdorff revealed in a tweet tonight.

Dust2.dk also confirmed this information with players at the Major that Valve was making them re-do their signatures.

Some Counter-Strike fans are pointing out that players had created signatures that were incredibly similar to commercially available fonts, which could create potential licensing issues. One famous example would be dimasick's 2018 ELEAGUE Boston Major sticker which looks as if the player used the Comic Sans font for his signature.

As seen below, Ali "Wicadia" Haydar Yalçın's signature design was taken directly from an existing font, and thus denied. Using non-commercial fonts can potentially endanger the ownership that the player has over the autograph, which they hand to Valve for the creation of the sticker. Without complete ownership of the signature, copyright issues could arise from the revenue created from in-game sales of the sticker.

Valve will be updating the stickers in due time and as zipeL says, they should go on sale soon.