What's the career progression for streamers and eSports players, anyway? I feel like everyone that does this now is going to be tired of it in 5 years, and then they're just 30 and without a college degree or job experience.
- Continue
- Retire
- Start coaching
- Start casting
- Management (Organizing/growing content creators/groups)
- Switch careers entirely
Any of the giants should hopefully have been saving there money and have quite a bunch tucked away. Any of the smaller ones should have been doing something on the side, or at least have a plan B ready.
Also, not sure why we're assuming no college degree here.
This is just like any other endeavor. Many try, most fail, some succeed wildly. We don't need to feel bad for the people that try and fail. That is part of life and progressing as a person.
If you have 250 viewers a few times a week, you're not quitting your day job for it. If you are, you should probably reconsider.
1. https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/T90Official/Broadcasts
I occasionally stream my desktop to show friends something - doesn't mean you should count me for that same list.
On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to sell the skill of building a large following to employers, and plenty of companies looking for people who are experts in social media/streaming platforms.
Ask a few military vets, many legitimately just start at the bottom at the totem some place novel into their mid 30s.
Maybe I'm jaundiced because I just had to fill out my annual review self-assessment and skipped the "5-year plan" because I simply couldn't be bothered to lie about it.
I suppose I was misinformed in that I thought that cars of all value ranges were pretty disastrous assets to hold - but it sounds like holding on to them for value appreciation still isn't a particularly good tactic.
Professional video game streaming is relatively new. It's a valid question.
Eventually though they will have to quit their sport due to wear and tear and no longer being at a peak level. And most will probably never really progress to a level where they can make some quick millions from a contract and then retire early.
So what then?
I'm a proponent of the idea that your athletic scholarship at a Division I-A school should be for "sports degree" and that it should entitle you to come back prepaid for an "academic" 4 year degree when that track runs out.
That would stop a lot of the idiocy we see around "student athletes".
Doing anything at a high level tends to cultivate skills that translate to other areas. General skills like focus and discipline come to mind.
i was pleasantly surprised one day to find I was working side-by-side with someone who was once a minor music celebrity
they had pivoted in their 20-somethings after a decent payout, used it to finance their education, and are now just 'one of us' haha
His girlfriend (now wife) describes the experience of being with someone who was once somewhat famous in this article [0] -- There were moments of extreme cognitive dissonance when I saw him up there. He’s a wild and expert showman on stage. As I’d watch him do things like play the keyboard by smashing it with his forehead, spit water all over the audience or writhe convulsively on the ground, I would think, “I can’t believe this is the same man who likes to go to bed at 10 o’clock and sweetly brings me coffee in bed every morning.”
[0] - https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/travis-morrison-and...
In e-sports there's millions of people practicing every day and the built in ranking system can filter that down to the current top 0.1%. At this point branching out into actual competitions is not nearly as difficult as getting noticed by a NBA, NFL, etc. recruiter.
It does depend on the Game. CSGO players play a very limited number of maps so pure reaction time and hand-eye coordination is often the deciding factor. Strategy games like LoL and softer FPS games like Fortnite are less dependent on physical talent.
I doubt the boredom thing is that different for sports vs eSports. At least with eSports the game is changing due to patches. With sports, the game itself hardly changes.
For citation: see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... you can see reaction time starts to drop off rapidly starting at age 25
eSports players spend a lot more time playing than normal athletes. You can only be physically active for a few hours per day. eSports players can do a lot more, like tyler1 who consistently streams for 10+ hours 5 days a week.
Normal athletes arguably also get more variation. Football players don't play back to back football matches all day every day, they practice and improve in a lot of other ways. They also get more variation due to traveling around to play away games.
In CS:GO there were players around their 30s and were successful
https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro
e.g
>2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000
There is also societal stigma from playing video games seriously past early 20s(well atleast 5-10+ years ago, but with Twitch and things it is now way more accceptable).
"Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important" is laughable.
2. The athletes who do play "past their prime" are usually making up for reduced physical acuity with other skills (e.g. you don't see very many baseball players hit triples after 30).
3. Players with long careers invest a huge amount of time in conditioning, and to a hard-to-measure degree, PEDs.
4. I don't really follow eSports; If someone played Starcraft competitively 20 years ago, are they still playing SC, or do they switch to something else like LoL? What's the typical competitive "lifetime" of a game? If you picked up game-specific skills, it might be harder to apply #2 when the game du-jour changes.
5. As a slight nitpick to the whole conversation, my understanding is that "reaction time" is perhaps a misnomer; the drop in reaction time with age for performing a simple activity appears to be relatively minor, but more complex activities (including habitual ones like driving), which suggests that the performance decline is in selecting and/or executing the proper response to a stimuli rather than what we think of as pure "reaction time"
The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while.
In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.
https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro
e.g
>2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000