Some clans formed by groups of players have grown into multi-million dollar professional esports teams.
As the first-person shooter (FPS) genre became increasingly popular, the idea of a competitive clan became widely accepted.
Many massively multiplayer online (MMO) and role-playing video games (RPGs) tend to call them "guilds" or invent their own term.
Examples of this include Star Wars Galaxies ("player associations"[3]) and EVE Online ("corporations"[4]).
This third-tier arrangement isn't supported by the game software as such; instead, coalitions are purely player driven creations.