Is a Career in Professional Gaming now Worth It?
Blizzard took a nod towards this becoming more official. They recently announced that Overwatch league pro gamers will receive a $50k minimum salary. Gaming organizations are also being required to provide health insurance and retirement plans if they plan on participating in the league; players are also getting a portion of every event/tournament they win (Winning team of big tournaments usually earn around $1 million). Blizzard is trying to make the eSports scene for Overwatch parallel professional sports leagues by tying teams to cities. The only difference is that players aren't drafted; people with a specific age and skill level are allowed to participate.
Riot Games and League of Legends are doing the same thing except the minimum salary is $75k.
Thoughts on this?
Please discuss.
If you're good enough, why not?
$50K-$75K plus benefits plus winnings (splitting $1,000,000?) all for playing video games? In a world where "instagram models" are a thing and make a living by you using their code for 10% off buying shit you don't need, why wouldn't "Professional Gamer" be a thing? Good on them.
The current title is "instagram entrepreneur". Yes, posting daily pics of your ass, while promoting the latest tummy tea or high-end shakes, is entrepreneurship. Boss girls. CEO Bitch, or whatever the fuck they like to call themselves.
You look at who their followers are and it's all the same Pakistani dude in sunglasses
The International which is the biggest Dota2 tournament has a prize pool of almost $24 million. With $10 million being the first prize. I've also read somewhere that Dota2 commentators/analysts make a lot of money off their streams as well, most of these people being former pro-players or have been in the business for a while.
That's crazy...who covers this? Do people pay to watch these matches live?
Usually its Twitch.tv that covers all of the big tournaments, Counterstrike tournaments do air on television though too.
Big sponsorship deals.
Valve sells some in game items/content related to those competitions, gamers buy bundles/access to streams/other bullshit. In general it's a really smart business model for highly competitive games such as CS/Dota/LoL
I just found this: https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Tournaments#Majors
According to this link, there are a number of major tournaments every year. The most recent ones in Boston and Kiev, both prize money of $3mm. Both times the same group won...
yeah this is true. I am a Dota 2 player myself. A kid called Syed Sumail Hassan (my favorite player) from Pakistan became the youngest world Dota 2 champion and made over $100 dollars in TI5. He's not 20 yet.
You really have to be from a country that facilitates professional gaming, at least from what I have seen.
I grew up playing CSGO, it is still my guilty pleasure I just don't have the time I use to, whatever. Most of the best players are European or Brazilian. In Brazil Counterstrike is ingrained in society, they have bars where you can watch tournaments etc.. CSGO is on the lower end of the professional gaming big leagues, but the winning teams are still taking home >$1 million.
Also, there is so much money to be made being a streamer as well. If you go look at some of the streamers top donors you will constantly see people (one user) that have donated over $30k to them. A lot of the pros are 'retiring' and becoming full time streamers for the gaming organizations like Cloud 9.
Agree with the fact the country you are born in heavily influences professional gaming. Countries like South Korea have such a better infrastructure than the U.S. for gaming, it's part of their culture. If you look at top LoL players in the NA league, most are from Korea or EU (Denmark).
Top League of Legends streamer named qtpie makes ~$2 million a year purely from streaming. Averages more than 30k viewers daily and was once a professional player. Other top LoL players like Bjergsen and Faker probably make a similar amount if not more from winning competitions, streaming and endorsements. The bottom tier/average players still make a decent living when you factor in the $75k they make as well as earnings from streams and the fact all their living expenses are paid for (living in a team house). Not to mention most of these guys are
But realistically, what's the average lifespan of a professional gamer? Just because you are amazing at NBA 2k17 doesn't mean you will be amazing at 2k20. Not a gamer, so apologies if the example is bad.
Great point. This is actually a problem specifically in LoL where different champions being played will favor different players. I would say a player can get away with a 2-3 year career minimum if they are good enough and dedicate the time to do so. The hardest part is getting to that level where you are picked up by a professional organization. In the pro LoL league they are also implementing a franchise program where teams can no longer be relegated from the top league. However, as you pointed out, a long term career (>10 years) will likely not be plausible but it has yet to be seen. A lot of teams will promote the player to go back to school/finish their degree or even push back their degree for a few years.
From a player POV, that is a big risk. NBA is a bad example though, the MOBA genre (where most of the money is) is a better example. There are a lot of players who were competitive level at HoN or Dota 1 during their height, and have become above-average players in dota 2, but never quite making into the same stratosphere. AngryTestie for example, a former SC2 and HoN professional, states that he is too old (unsure of his age, but 30 at a guess) to try to compete Dota 2 scene. It is difficult to know however if some of this is owed to increasing competition as the industry has grown, or if he has really become too old. I would speculate it is the former however.
The main problem with gaming is that the money is generally very top heavy, and those who won tournaments win a disproportionate slice. Obviously you want incentive to win, but if the teams in slots 5-10 aren't earning enough to really make a living from it, competition is effectively reduced. In this respect, the industry lacks a lot of maturity (which isn't surprising i suppose) in how it is structured. If an entrepreneur cared to, there is a lot of money on the table in this area.
To the guy quoting playing 8-12 hours per day, that isn't really that bad considering it is something they genuinely enjoy. No one sets out to become professional, they are already at the top of the game, and make a decision to take the next step. Most players who aren't professional but who are at the top probably player 4-6+ hours per day anyway. The difference between them and pros is that the pro player has the time for further commitment.
For context, i'm a very high ranked moba player myself, but not professional. Players I have played with have won TI's, etc. Despite my stature (statistically in top
I'm going to use League of Legends as an example. The way to get onto the pro scene is extremely difficult. You would sign up with a team and go into qualifiers (You could go in Spring or Summer), then you would have to win qualifiers against multiple teams. Once you win, you would go into the challenger series, where it's your team versus other amateur teams. If you are one of the top teams, you would go to playoffs, if you win playoffs, you are then placed into promotion series, where it's the bottom few pro teams versus the top few amateur teams. Win that then you are placed into the pro scene for whatever season you went into (Spring/Summer).*
*This is under the assumption you always win, if you lose any one of them, it's a whole other mess to break into the pro scene. Usually, this isn't the case, so you might be seeing yourself spending time in the amateur league for a year or two (depending on you and your team), and end up finally making it when your 19/20 (if you start when you're 18). You could then assume a good 3-5 year career if you can keep up with all the patches and changes to the game and the meta.
Man... if I could get paid to play Call of Duty all day... that would be the life.
Just start a YouTube channel and film yourself playing it all day. Seems to work for a lot of people.
I did this back in 2011 and made a anywhere from $200-500 a month uploading once a week. Solid paycheck for a senior in highschool.
This is interesting because I actually play Overwatch (Currently max SR 3500(Just under highest rank in the game)) and I've looked into this. Ultimately, It does seem enticing but I've seen fellow friends who have joined teams develop problems with their hands from excessive playing. That plus if you don't keep up with your health, it deteriorates quickly. Also to answer those who wonder what the life-span of a "gamer" is, it actually is very well into the 40's. That or you could easily become a streamer or voice caster for professional events. If I haven't dropped all my $ on school, I'd definitely try it.
I would love to see individuals actually reach that height in gaming.
I have reached the top 1% in League of Legends... and was still no where close enough to the actual pros or even amateur professionals in the scene at the time.
Also they guys work like bankers.. they play these games for 12-16hours a day.. their lifestyle is fairly similar to a bankers lifestyle.
It's kind of like everything else where you can just do it while having a great personality and being mediocre and make more than the most technically skilled people putting in 4X the hours...
True, I would play roughly 2 games a day keep my rank. If I wanted to get any higher I would have to put in anywhere from 6-10 games a day, which I would rather spend my time else where.
Although the bottles are Mountain Dew and the models are anime life-sized pillows
i'm sure they have more fun though
Video games are getting so fucking good these days. I was a WoW nerd in middle/early high school and can’t even really blame myself. I had nothing exciting going on in real life. Now, I’ve been trying to find time to finish Mass Effect 2 for a year and bought Witcher 6 months ago and have put like an hour into it… The MMOs are so good these days, the RTS is good, the open-world RPGs are amazing… I almost can’t blame some people for just checking out from real life. What if all this life shit is just a simulation though? It’s like the best video game ever designed if you think about it. You make choices and those choices have consequences and there are zigs and zags and twists and turns and you can do very well or very poorly… If you check out, what if you’re checking out from the real game?...
But what’s going to happen when VR melds with gaming and they make games that are so enthralling that people just want to live there? We have a lot of people today who just play video games 16 hours a day, either get welfare or work minimum wage to support themselves, have checked out of the reproduction market, etc… That will just be magnified. How does some form of Universal Basic Income (which really means national basic income in today’s conversation), which seems inevitable, factor into this?
Is there going to be a small section of the population who self-select to remain in this game of life and trade with one another, all productive high-achievers, while siphoning off a fraction of their output to keep those who’ve checked out alive in their life-support VR pods? A hidden eutopia like in Atlas Shrugged… Will they, one day without announcement, pull the cords on all of the life support VR pods? Will the next stage of human evolution happen in a giant leap?
A career in professional gaming isn't something you just randomly choose to do. Gaming is extremely competitive and there's a high amount of training and talent that goes with it (much like sports).
Streaming on the other hand is not as competitive and you can still make decent money. You just need to be entertaining and be in the top 0.5-1% of players.
Also, how often do you need to move from one game to another? Pro $$$ e-sports is quite a new phenomenon.
15 years ago, some friends of mine used to play CS 1.6 "professionally", meaning that they went from one tournament to another and played under the same clan. Back then the cash prizes were very small. Like $10k split on a team of players. Some of them were pretty much on welfare.
Back then, people used to play Quake 3 Arena, Doom, UT, CS, Team Fortress, StarCraft, and maybe Age of Empires ? And Warcraft 3, this was just before WoW hit the scene.
Today, of all those games, I think only SC is still considered a pro-level game. And the updated version of CS.
So I guess if you're gonna try for a career in gaming, you'll have to keep up with the latest and trendiest games, unless you're lucky to find something that lasts for 20 years. I'm gonna assume that there's no direct skill-transfer from one game to another...meaning that a world-class gamer in Game A doesn't automatically guarantee world-class gamer in Game B, even though they are quite similar.
I see that some of you guys have mentioned Counter Strike GO - but on the real though, NOTHING comes even close to what CS 1.6 used to be. I miss the 1.6 days so much... Dust2, Aztec, Inferno, Office... so many good memories :)
CS1.6 is what? 17 years ago?
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