From his comment in another post
Hey all - I read a few negative comments tied to this announcement. This announcement is supposed to be a good one. Let me explain:
As you are informed in this video we released (link: https://youtu.be/0c2dbUwAzOQ?t=306), we let our botlane know of our intentions the moment we knew these were indeed our intentions. Unfortunately, the fact that we were brainstorming our 2019 lineup became public before we even took a decision.
The moment we told both players that this was the direction we were taking, and before we even signed any replacement for them, we proceeded to start looking for teams where they could join. We were incredibly lenient and kind when looking at the potential buyouts for both players. For additional context, both players were allowed to study options in the market exactly one and a half (1.5) days after Free Agency Period started. This is clearly a completely different scenario than we've seen from many counterparts of ours.
Despite our very, very, very best efforts to make sure both players end up in a great organization, we were unfortunately not able to position Hjarnan anywhere he was comfortable heading to. In our humble opinion, he has an incredible level that justifies any top5 team from both EU and NA getting him into the starting lineup.
As a result of the above, we gave Hjarnan three options: (1) He stays with us and we find him a place in our academy team, (2) He becomes a sub for the team, or (3) He gets released, for free, without G2 receiving any economic incentive for it, further increasing the chance that, wherever he goes, he can subsequently have a strong signing bonus and hopefully access to better terms. This, for context, is not industry standard and I can confidently say that I know not of any team that does this from either NA or EU.
He chose Option 3.
Please, be so kind not to be cynical about everything you read (Note: this doesn't apply just to this specific topic, but to every topic you could wrap your head around that may be discussed these days). There is a reason why some of the best players on earth, on some of the largest games on the planet choose to come with us, and renew contracts for large duration while receiving industry standard compensations.
We treat our players, partners and fans with care and respect. And this situation is frankly no different.
So it seems that they treated their players fairly well, and it was just unfortunate that Hjarnan didn't get a spot elsewhere so far.
