At one point or another, it was every young gamer’s dream to one day become a professional gamer. With video games already consuming most of your time and energy, who would turn down an opportunity to play games all day for money?
If you are like me, your professional gaming aspirations died from two causes: your parent’s wrath and the fact that you weren’t actually that good at any game.
My question is, with the steady expansion of the gaming industry, will there every be a time where professional gaming aspirations can be as realistic as professional careers in athletics? In a way, we are all playing games, but of a different sort.
According to this article:
http://seanspage.hubpages.com/hub/Be-Aware-Can-professional-gaming-be-a-legitimate-career-path
- The best Starcraft gamers in the world boast over 300,000 dollars in annual revenue.
- League of Legends tournaments award the top 8 teams a prize of 175,000 dollars.
- Counter Strike and WoW players can also make a lot more money than an average United States salary.
However, it is very hard to predict a pro gamer’s income with any consistency. Besides some sponsor money, most pro gamers aren’t guaranteed any income at all.
So let me know what you guys think, will there come a day when a career in gaming is a legitimate thing?
There is a critical problem with professional gaming ever being viable enough to compare to professional sports and that is the raw difference in number of spectators. Ultimately, professional sports are only hugely successful because of the amount of people that want to watch them. A ton of people want to watch football in America, but how often do you see rifle competitions on television? Surely they happen and they have a following, but the following is negligible in comparison to the major sports in the country. They major sports have tons of casual viewers, who may not play or even fully understand the sports but still enjoy watching them. Some people just want a reason to get wild and excited, yet I’ve still yet to go to a bar that has a gamer competition on the TVs. Professional gamers do not have casual fans. The people that are into watching these competitions not only play the games but are very into these games, likely obsessed. I try playing Starcraft or DOTA but I would never, even for a second, consider watching a competition held for one of games unless I was paid to do so. That being said, I will watch videos of people playing games I really enjoy, sometimes. The spectators determine the value of a player in a spectator sport and I just don’t believe professional gaming, right or wrong, will ever climb to the level of professional sports.
I think that in the world of professional gaming, even though it is hard to get a consistent income, getting consistent sponsorships should not be an issue. I know there are some professional teams in which companies pay for their housing, their technology and for their clothing. Even though they will not get an X amount of guaranteed consistent income, they will still be able to get enough through sponsorships gifts and advertising.
As someone involved in the e-sports scene I feel that professional gaming is something that can work for those who are committed to the time investment it demands as well as the amount of inherent talent that needs to be good at these games.
In terms of longer-term sustainability I am not so sure about a career as a progamer as many have mentioned, the market is both volatile due to reliability on sponsors rather than from the viewers. I’ve personally found that there is higher lucrativity in the professional gaming market as an entertainer or content creator simply because your revenue does not depend on your gaming performance as much as it does your ability to be a personality.
On the other hand there are those at the top of the crop who have made long time careers of professional gaming. On the website http://www.esportsearnings.com/players , you can see that all the people on the top 25 list of have made their winnings and reputation amongst 2-3 games over the past 10 years. Players like Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel have made millions over a number of games such as Quake, Painkiller, and Counterstrike, and legends like Manuel Schenkhuizen, a Dutch StarCraft player has made his money shared between SC2 and WarCraft 3.
I agree with Dalton. I personally don’t think gaming will ever become a profession, at least not in the same sense as a corporate full-time job. While being a professional gamer may take up the same amount of time as a regular job, maybe even more, the work they are contributing is not the same. One inputs work that increases a company’s revenue either by contributing work to a project that makes the company money through customers and in turn the company pays him/her, or by contributing work that somehow saves the company money. The other inputs work to improve his or her skills, which in turn may make money from sponsors, but if he loses or does not improve, that money is gone. Now, the same could be said of a corporate worker. His skills may not be enough when performance checks come around and he gets fired, but it’s a lot easier in my opinion for a corporate worker to improve his skills than it is for a gamer.
In the sense of sports, first off, the fan base for professional sports is a lot larger than for video games. Millions and millions of people watch all kinds of sports. I don’t think the same can be said of video games. Sports players get money from contracts, which is in a sense a salary for a number of years. Sports teams get their money from sponsors, ticket sales, advertisements and all kinds of sources. Gamers get money from sponsors, which was mentioned below, is not very stable and depends heavily on performance. They don’t receive contracts, so they aren’t guaranteed to be paid. So I believe the professional gaming area is too volatile and uncertain to ever become an actual profession.
I have a friend who went professional in League of Legends for about a year, and most of my experience interacting with him echoed the above. In order to be among the best of the best, you have to completely dedicate yourself to the game – as it is your craft, and your livelihood. Honestly, it’s exactly the same as being a professional in any field – a given person will dedicate his time and effort doing (hopefully) what they enjoy doing best, and in that respect – pro-gaming is no different. In regards to it being viable as a career path – sure, it’s just a small field. Competitive games have far fewer individuals/teams associated with them than most other athletic sports, such as fake football and real football. However, I feel that in time this will change as e-sports continue to grow and foster more teams.
I think there is a chance that the professional gaming can be a viable career, but just not how it is currently. You have to take into consideration between the players of professional sports and players of professional video games. Many professional athletes play for teams that pay them to play. This is done with a contract that says that this player must play for team for so many years and in return they will pay them (and sometime if they do well, they will be payed extra). This could exist in professional video gaming but it is strange to think about how that would work. But, not all professional athletes are on a team, like golf, and tennis. I think professional video gaming would look more like these sports than anything else. Most of their money is made from sponsorships with extra on the side from tournament wins. I am not sure how sponsorships work so I am not even going to try and guess. But here the athletes make as much money as they can in their professional sport career (could be very short) until they are no longer good. They then try to make that money last till death, sometimes needing to get a new job, like commentating or coaching, if it runs out. There are two big problems I see with this working in professional gaming. The first one is that the sponsorships for professional gaming don’t make as much money as professional sports. Professional sports get a lot of television play where the sponsors can know that people will see that athlete using their brand, so they can invest a good amount of money. Professional gaming on the other had is mostly shown through free web streaming. The last time I checked, Direct TV doesn’t have a professional gaming package. The second big problem is that through updates, video games change, and change rapidly with updates and new versions. The sport of golf really hasn’t changed much in terms of game play in a very long time. But this years halo could add 10 all new mechanics which would change how the game is played. Lets say I am a professional Dota player and my hero of choice is Pudge. I play Pudge because I am really good at being pudge, I’ve tried other heroes in the past and I can get by, but Pudge is where I got where I am today. Then in the most recent Dota update, Pudge is nerfed, alot. Now he is useless in competitive play and I am not at the professional standards for any other character. This could be a bad example but it shows how the rapid changing of a game could affect the ‘sport’ of professional gaming. To rap things up, I would say that it is possible for someone to have a viable career with professional gaming, but only if professional gaming would rapidly change from what it is today.
I completely agree with what Dalton said about the for sponsorship that are only really available for the top tier elites. But i don’t money itself is the reason why programming is or ever will be legitimized. Its the infrastructure. These guys know programming is not a lifelong career path, like most sports, their skills will eventually deteriorate and they will retire young. A high salary or prize winnings can certainly ease this truth ; if you spend all of this time and passion on an activity that you turn out to be good at, and then suddenly have to leave early due to your skills deteriorating , was the time spent doing what you had to do worth it? For many it is , just look at professional sports and how young some of these guys retire.
Besides money, the biggest issue is keeping withing a respective country, a constant resupply of talent. This requires infrastructure. Just look at south Korea and its KESPA starcraft leauge ( http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Korea_e-Sports_Association ) . They have several ranking of players, and teams that are sponsered by huge Korean companies, for example the Legendary Boxers old team , SK telecom http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/SK_Telecom_T1 . These teams have both the S class and the A to B class of players, with leagues corresponding to each level. Sure the lower level leagues have crap pay and no one will really watch these plays but these lower leagues are where the new generation of talent springs from.
Without a proper stream of new players streaming in through a well grounded infrastructure , we cant really get serous about esports here in the states. Imagine if the NFL did not have the NCAA . which has has been called a glorified NFL recruitment tool .
Piggybacking off of what Bokang said, I think that being a professional gamer necessarily cannot be a viable career for most people. As you have mentioned, professional gamers make their money from sponsorship and this supply is limited. If a large number of people were to become “professional” gamers, sponsors would still only support the top people in the sport, forcing the less good, and therefor unsponsored players/teams to seek other employment, and by definition not make them professional gamers (since you need to be paid to be a professional).
If professional gaming were to become more like professional baseball or football in terms of employment, my original point would still stand. Although professional athletes make their money as part of a salary and not from sponsorship, the career path is still limited to the best of the best. Teams hiring professional gamers would still only be looking for the top players in the field and therefor limit the legitimacy of the career to those who are the top players in the world.
I think a gaming career is totally valid and possible but this career path only fits those people who regards playing game as their lives, who will give up everything else in order to dedicate their efforts of becoming a professional gamer. Being a professional game is nothing different from being a professional athlete. For example, soccer is the most popular sports on earth. Millions of people love playing soccer but only a very few of them can become professional soccer players and make a living out of it. Those people who become professional soccer players don’t come without a reason: most of them are born with outstanding talent and skills and are trained in a professional way when they are very young. I think being a professional gamer is the same, besides dedicating to what you do, you have to have some talents and train yourself in a reasonably professional way. This process is going to take a conceivably long time. Therefore, I don’t think being a professional gamer is everyone’s game.