Rivalry Downgraded to Tier 2 on TSX Venture Exchange as CEO Resigns
Rivalry Corp announced Thursday that the TSX Venture Exchange has downgraded its listing classification from Tier 1 to Tier 2.
The downgrade, effective June 30, follows the company’s inability to satisfy continued Tier 1 listing requirements. CEO Steven Salz, who co-founded the Toronto-based esports betting and online gaming operator in 2016, resigned at the same time.
The company’s shares remain suspended from trading under a cease-trade order issued by the Ontario Securities Commission on May 6, following Rivalry’s failure to file its audited annual financial statements for the fiscal year 2025. Reinstatement would require both revocation of that order and a satisfactory exchange review, neither of which is imminent.
The July 3 announcement is the formal culmination of a collapse that has been unfolding publicly for months. Rivalry halted all betting operations in February, refunded players, and announced it was in discussions with third parties about potential transactions, including a full or partial sale. In April, all three co-founders and the CTO, COO, and interim CFO resigned simultaneously, stripping the company of most of its senior leadership in a single announcement.
Salz remained until last week, the last founder standing, having previously taken a voluntary 100% pay cut alongside other executives during the company’s restructuring period.
Rivalry Built Something Original, Still Not Enough to Compete
The story of what Rivalry built, and why it did not survive, is worth telling because the company was genuinely trying something different in a category where differentiation is mostly cosmetic.
Rivalry’s core thesis was that the next generation of gamblers, the esports-native, digitally literate, meme-fluent cohort that came of age playing Counter-Strike and watching Twitch, would not be satisfied by the standard online sportsbook interface that the established operators had built for their parents. The thesis wasn’t completely wrong. It just proved very difficult to monetize at scale as a small publicly traded company on the TSX Venture Exchange, competing against operators with significantly more capital.
Casino.exe, Rivalry’s Canadian iGaming product launched in 2023, was the purest expression of that thesis. Rather than offering a standard casino interface with thousands of slot games and a generic UI, the company built a functional virtual desktop computer running a fictional operating system styled after Windows 95.
Players booted up to find retro desktop icons, a working MP3 player loaded with techno from the LimeWire era, and what the company described as “a purple sea creature who shit-talks you” as a companion. Custom game box art mimicked the packaging of late-90s PC games. The blog post announcing Casino.exe opened with the tagline “Finally, an online casino that doesn’t suck.”
It was charming, original, and a breath of fresh air in an industry where the majority of platforms look extremely similar. Rivalry’s own description of what differentiated Casino.exe from every other online casino product captures both the appeal and the problem: “What’s the difference between playing Wheel of Fortune from one casino platform to the next? The answer is there isn’t one. But on Rivalry, you have a purple sea creature who shit-talks you and an MP3 player with a techno playlist you used to listen to on Limewire before it gave you a virus and destroyed your family computer.”
The product was built on real cultural insight. The problem is that cultural insight does not pay the bills when the underlying business requires capital-intensive customer acquisition in a market dominated by operators spending hundreds of millions annually on promotions and brand.
Rivarly Pivoted, But Never Found the Right Product-Market Fit
Rivalry reported a record quarter for its Ontario business in December 2025 and narrowed its net loss by 67% for full-year 2024. Those numbers, read charitably, suggest the core product was working in at least one jurisdiction. Read less charitably, they suggest a company that was too small, too thinly capitalized, and too dependent on a single market to absorb the structural headwinds bearing down on the esports betting category specifically.
Esports betting has consistently underperformed its early projections as a wagering category. The audience that watches esports is younger, less affluent, and less habituated to gambling than the sports betting market’s core demographic. Converting esports fans into bettors at scale has proven harder than the early market projections suggested, and the esports events ecosystem remains more fragile and less predictable than traditional sports leagues, creating operational challenges for sportsbooks trying to maintain consistent market depth.
Rivalry pivoted repeatedly in response: an increased focus on cryptocurrency, repositioning toward high-value digital-first players, a sportsbook revamp, and the Casino.exe push into iGaming. Each pivot reflected genuine strategic thinking. Cumulatively, they reflect a company that was searching for the right product-market fit without ever finding stable ground under it.
The voluntary pay cuts, the strategic review announced in April 2025, the eventual halt of operations in February 2026, and now the formal delisting cascade are the chapters of a failure that the company’s founders clearly saw coming long before the public announcements confirmed it. Salz’s willingness to take a 100% pay cut and keep fighting for months after most of the leadership had already left says something about how much he believed in what Rivalry was trying to build.
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