Esports stars have shorter careers than NFL players
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
eSports being basically an office job is not going to have that issue, people who are sitting in a chair for hours at a time look like they can be pushed harder until quite late in the night. That goes for both gamers and people doing normal office jobs, you're pooped out way before you look like you are. There's a psychological toll that is hard to see.
Having said that the main thrust of the article is economic. If people got paid more, they'd do it more. NFL players get paid experienced FAANG dev salaries at minimum, fantasy money at the top. There's good reasons to stay in the game as long as possible. If people were paid that kind of money to play games, they would stick around and the narrative would switch from young-and-fast to older-and-experienced.
NCAA and players' unions also define how much a player can practice in those sports.
For instance in the NFL you see a few players get sidelined in every game, sometimes they are feeling better and are back in the game a few minutes later, but as you get to the end of the season the roster gets thinner and thinner.
A team that starts out strong at the beginning of the season can get badly battered by the end of the season and end up playing poorly overall and (particularly) losing in the playoffs. In every play they have to ask "is it worth getting hurt?" and if the play is unlikely to change the outcome of the game they are likely to "take a knee" or otherwise play to avoid injury instead of trying to win.
Young prodigy climbs the ranks by playing ruthless winning strategies > he wins everything there is to win > he sees that the prize money isn't all that > he deprioritizes winning at all costs and emphasizes more on the fun side of things and being an ambassador for the game
- Maru[0] (age 24) 2010-present
- DRG[1] (age 30) 2011-present (minus 2 years off for military service)
So arguably Maru could have another 6 years in him or more.
Interesting trivia: One reason StarCraft 1: BroodWar is more popular in S.Korea (despite it having janky motion even with the Remastered graphics) is because many took to the game during a major economic downturn. [Can't remember where I watched that reported, maybe a Netflix documentary.]
There's hope that Microsoft/ActivisionBlizzard may figure out how to monetize the free-to-play game to sustain & grow it.
Beyond game longevity, each game can only support a tiny number of professionals and the games balance is often changed in response to overly dominant strategies. On top of this as you gain fame people will prepare to counter you specifically. Combined with injuries or other out of game issues and it’s extremely uncommon for people to be self sufficient for very long.
It's also why almost nobody is trying to break into the scene, and why you see the same players who have been competing for decades place well.
And yes, Serral and Reynor are exceptions to this.
There are also several AoE 2 players who are coming up on or have already passed their 10th anniversary of professional play.
Also looking at retirement age doesn't make a lot of sense, because a lot of gaming careers start younger than NFL careers.
I genuinely hope not. Not everything needs to grow and StarCraft 1 is fine the way it is.
StarCraft/Brood War was the most fun I had playing 1v1 and FFA. It's hard to go back to the janky unit routing, small control groups, etc after being spoiled with SC2. The Remastered graphics update is nice but somehow loses some of the charm. It's more pleasant to watch now than the VGA graphics would be though. Was there ever a Brood War units/maps done in the SC2 engine?
If you're a top player at one game but then that game stops doing tournaments, it is probably a hard decision whether to walk away or learn a new game.
Yes, a lot of motor skills might transfer over but a lot of knowledge is lost.
EG: League of Legends and DOTA 2 are similar games but different metas, different characters, some different mechanics entirely. It's enough of a gulf that you have to put in a lot of effort to cross over, especially at the high end.
But there's definitely a lot of parallels between the games.
I'm bummed we don't have more of them.
But it is very similar with RTS, there is a huge crossover (although one factor here is that AoE4 isn't popular with a lot of the AoE2 crowd, another factor is that AoE4 has been a bit of a flop...pro games are getting terrible views so many are just choosing to stay on AoE2).
League of Legends still kicking it. Dota2 still kicking it. CSGO still kicking it.
These three been the top eSports games for over a decade now.
https://steamcharts.com/app/730#All
Where on that chart is CSGO getting wrecked?
And markets are getting crowded. Select older brands have some nostalgia factor propping them up too.
Or, in the case of Super Smash Brothers Melee, if the game developers spend a decade trying to kill the scene but it just won't die.
While chess, football, basketball, etc. Have rule variances and tweaks, they are stable.
The constant title churn will always be working against building the kind of competitive scenes in mainline sports because they are resetting the rules (and therefore skills), changing pools and generally creating a sort of institutional amnesia.
It's just like any CCG "pro" scene. The time investment isn't worth the rewards. My friends and I would play Magic: the Gathering competitively, hitting the qualifiers and feeder tournaments. We did ok. Cashed some tournaments between us. Won some state championships between us. None of us ever qualified for the Pro Tour however. Because, I was a working software developer. I wasn't going to drop that job to make less for more overall effort. Another of us is an engineer. Same thing. His job paid more unless he could guarantee winning major tournaments consistently.
It's a young man's game, because it's a poor man's game.
And while NFL players have an average career around 3 or 4 years, they're clearing a few hundred thousand each of those years.
There's a lot of churn at the bottom end of NFL rosters. A lot of guys don't make it through their rookie contract. If you make it 3 years, you're likely play for about 6 or 7. If I remember correctly, I ran the numbers on this at one point. Essentially "average career" is a lot like "life expectancy", it's greatly affected by the sports equivalent of infant mortality. So, in sports, you have a lot of guys with decent careers to pull the average up. In eSports, the number of people with careers longer than a couple of years is rare.
Because the money isn't there.
MTG? A poor man's game?! HAH!
...Unless you mean it's the reason he's poor.
The average cost of a Legacy deck is $4000. And that's a one-time expense. After that, the on-going costs: sleeves, entry fees, travel, etc aren't horrible.
But plenty of poor people play Magic. More poor people than affluent people. Plenty of people make poor financial decisions. Like buying boosters instead of singles to get cards for decks. Like trying to make playing Magic a career instead of anything else.
For like two years everyone is able to attend to events the client offers that can lead to an invitation to more events that eventually lead to tourniers where real money is on the table.
That's the equivalent of making around $57k a year.
They're doubling the prize purse for the Pro Tour this year. So, at best, someone could make $2 million with the same results over the same time frame.
Red Bull Untapped had a prize purse of $200,000. That's $50,000 less than the old Pro Tour had. Not to mention, that's the entire purse.
If you won an offline qualifier and the finals, you would have won $30k.
For contrast, the NFL pays $75,000 to each player on the losing team in the Super Bowl. That's outside of their normal salary. That's money paid to the players by the league itself (from a pool of money collected from the member clubs). And playoff bonuses go all the way down. If you're a wild card team who loses in the wild card round, that's $37,500 per player.
Being the 7th seed and getting bounced in the first game of the NFL playoffs pays better than winning the entire Red Bull series.
And that's ignoring that the NFL playoff bonuses are pure extra.
There is not "real money" there. It's at best amateur league.
My dad had a friend who was a Dallas Cowboy for... a few months. He spent all of summer training and the preseason partying and goofing off thinking he had it made for life. They ended up giving him the boot before the first regular season game. Somehow I have a feeling his "career" wasn't entirely uncommon.
By the time I met him, he was a children's exercise coach at a local rec center.
Guys who are drafted in the later rounds or undrafted free agents.
NFL rosters start at 90 during the training camp period. During the preseason (which is part of training camp), teams have to eventually cut down to the final 53 man roster and (now) 14 players will be selected to be on the practice squad after being cut.
So generally, there will be about 33 players who are not making the team in any fashion. Generally more because players will be signed and released during training camp as well. But yeah, teams sometimes just need bodies. They're not looking for the next NFL star, they're looking for someone with a certain minimum athletic ability to occupy a spot on the field. Warm bodies to fill camp slots.
They're like some of the most awkward calls. Because the teams are trying to sign a guy for a few weeks and the agent is trying to get his guy paid.
Games aren't cyclical. The money from some games has dried up, but the top competitive games are the same every year. And the money in those games is fairly good (LCS isn't the largest LoL league, average pay is close to half a mil). Consumers want to watch pros play the big games: LoL, CS:GO, DOTA2, etc.
But I think the gap between the 1st and 10th best player isn't as large as it is in some conventional sports (and the games are far less luck-based), so teams are quite happy to rinse players when they have a bad game and they don't tend to come back (it isn't related to age or even skill atrophy, it is related to the pressure to always win...you see the same thing in soccer where teams take short-term decisions for decades and get nowhere, regardless of how many resources they throw at it i.e. Manchester United).
Ironically, I think this has damaged the product. With OWL, they had an okay product but it was totally mismanaged at multiple levels. They tried to create franchises, but teams trade players furiously (so you had a London that was all Korean players, and which played in the Asia time zone during Covid). Most people watch to see their favourite player, the vast majority of the big names have retired or quit...so the teams will keep furiously trading, and no-one will watch because their favourite player isn't playing anymore (we will see what happens with OW2, but I doubt things improve...the product is just sterile). Esports leagues have a very skewed understanding of why people watch.
OWL = Overwatch league
LCS = League of legends championship series
To me the dumbest thing they did was legally kill community tournaments that made Competitive overwatch a thing in the first place. If they had kept a strong T2 league it could’ve done much more then cultivate talent for the pro league, they could’ve iterated and experimented on formats with the clear winning ideas being used by OWL FOR FREE.
Bunch of dummies who probably cashed out fantastically on their individual comp.
- former impassioned fan
And I could have forgiven it, if anyone made money...I don't think anyone has made money out of OWL. The fact they raised $100m was the first sign they were about to incinerate it all.
Maybe it can't ever recover but I think the game could have been more popular than LoL in the West. It had such a broad base of users (the only FPS-style game that had women) but they couldn't manage the game, couldn't manage the league, just total failure at every level (and they took years to develop OW2, which is basically a reskin of the original...embarrassing).
but trying to follow 12 different heroes in a FPS
popping a cluster of giant ult animations is impossible.
I watched some Overwatch matches on TV and found it... extremely hard to follow.
1. Watching other people play from a first-person perspective is rough. They need to figure out better camera angles or something. I don't know the exact answer there. Also needed, perhaps, replays of key moments? Even more so than traditional sports, esports is so "blink and you missed it"
2. I've never played Overwatch specifically, so I didn't know the maps at all. The broadcasts really need to address this somehow unless they only want to appeal to people that already know the maps. Give me some kind of.... map overlay so I know where the heck the action is happening, relative to the goals on the map.
3. The announcers were unlistenable. They just sounded like fans. "OH!!!!!! GAMERDUDE123 WITH THE KILL!!!!! OOOOOOHHHHH!!!!!" Broadcasting traditional sports is extremely hard, and esports doubly so, so I realize how difficult a task it is. But my god. Unlistenable.
This was a few years ao, maybe it's better now. But it was basically a nightmare to me.
1. I never had an issue keeping up. I would have loved more perspectives (the Twitch option had multiple ways to watch) and I think if they'd kept up with that, it would have been even better, but the default view was pretty solid.
2. Map/Objectives overviews were frequently done, especially in the early days. In fact, it was almost a joke "Of course we know how it's played!"
3. I'm sorry, but I can't believe you were watching the same streams. They were clear with the callouts of events happening and what was going on. For a game that is so fast-paced, they did an excellent job of keeping you aware of what was happening. Suggesting that was just "OOOHHH!!! Feed kill! OHHHH!" is not accurate in the slightest.
I think the issue might be this: " watched some Overwatch matches on TV "
I never watched the matches on TV. I always watched it via Twitch or YouTube. Maybe the TV matches were highly edited in some way that didn't translate well. I don't know. What I do know is that what you describe and what I saw were completely different.
It definitely sounds like it was quite different from what you were watching.
Maybe it was just me, I don't know. I will certainly say that broadcasting esports just seems insanely hard.
Football (both american and european) and baseball show well I think because the game is on the surface simple. People are also usually exposed to it during school. The rules can get complex and rare rules (please do not do a balk) sometimes involve game downtime and the broadcast can use the opportunity to show replays and explain rules.
Video games have a harder time of this just due to the media. I know a lot about Overwatch, but when I watch LoL broadcasts they're similarly unwatchable, I have no idea what's going on.
I don't know how you could do with with something that is as non-stop as videogaming.
To really make things comprehensible you'd almost have to... give up the idea of a strictly "live" broadcast. Broadcast it on a short delay so there could be an opportunity for some exposition while the action is "paused."
It would be tough to find the right balance between hardcore-friendly and noob-friendly. But I'm sure it could be done. After all, traditional sports have found this balance.
OTOH I think MOBA's are the absolute worst. Unless you know the game well, its takes waayyy to much to learn who is doing what and what they can do if needed.
Zooming out, LoL was released in 2009; soccer was "released" maybe around 1848, not counting similar games throughout history [1]. I find it hard to believe that any of the listed games will remain dominant for very long relatively speaking, just by the fact that they are software products of the moment. People don't think of "soccer" as a product whatsoever; this changes the economics of going pro.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football#History
I do think the biggest issue of longevity is that these (e)sports are owned by private companies. You sorta hit at this about them being products. Companies can essentially can kill them when they want or if they stop making enough money. Maybe some sort of open source game yet to be developed owned by the community will be the first game to meet your Soccer like comparison.
Breaking news: as people get older they seek more high paying jobs.
Honestly, I think this article should have waited a few decades more before being written so there were proper stats, or at least stuck to discussing only games where there's been pros fore more than the measly two years that's apparently the bar for getting included.
An NBA player, warming the bench on a poorest performing team, is still making 1 million dollars/year. The equivalent esports player is probably sharing a house with 4 other guys and eating ramen.
Riffing a bit on your point, as best as I can tell, they all pretty much live in team houses or compounds depending upon the country where the team is located — when in China, my relative's then-current team would have lived in dedicated athlete housing that was part of a larger indoor/outdoor multisport stadium complex (COVID changed that and they evacuated to Korea). In the US it's typical to have a large rented team house, often with amenities like a swimming pool.
They eat ramen too, but that's because they like it. Efforts are made with team cooks, but what are you going to do, especially given the fact that these are all young people. Balenciaga kicks and 99c bowls of instant noodles do make an odd combo...
I don't know anything about shoes, but I looked up Balenciaga and those have to be some of the ugliest shoes I have ever seen.
https://www.balenciaga.com/en-us/defender-sneaker-green-6856...
Still, nothing I'd want to buy for 1/10th their asking price, though.
Johan Sundstein has made just over $7 million over 9 years. Or about $780k per year. No slouch, obviously. But that's under the average yearly salary for the NBA. If you are the best at your position in most sports, you're starting salary negotiations there.
This is almost kind of cheating as NBA is one of the highest paying leagues on a per player basis.
A top esports player might take a higher % of the total pie, even though the absolute number is smaller.
Choosing to chase after a bigger slice of a smaller pie is still a choice. Especially when you can get more pie by getting a smaller slice of a much bigger pie.
We don't compare salaries across companies along the lines of "percentage of total revenue". Getting 200k TC at FAANG is seen as better than getting 75K anywhere else even if that 75k may represent a higher percentage of that company's revenue.
I don't hold for a moment that the average pro gamer has the skills to transition to "traditional" sports.
So, like, at what level is a choice to grab the smaller pie, vs the choice to focus on a specific skill they do actually have over and above a desk job
If you can make it in NFL, NBA, MLB, etc, you do. And the true superstars often have the option of multiple sports. Patrick Mahomes was drafted for both the NFL and MLB. Lebron James got tryouts with a couple of teams. Bo Jackson had a professional football career and a professional baseball career concurrently.
Football, baseball, rugby, soccer, and basketball all "poach" from the others' sports because athletes gonna athlete.
But badminton is already a cousin to tennis. And if you can do well in tennis, you should do that. The only reason to be the best in badminton rather than the best in tennis is some weird obsession. You choose niches when you can't or don't want to compete in the general arena.
Second. It's not a choice between eSports and traditional sports.
It's a choice between eSports and almost anything else. The goal isn't to play something with sports in the title, the goal is to earn a living. And the best eSports player in the world is getting outearned by mid-level accountants. You could go to college for four years, spend under $40k, get an accounting degree, then go get a job at any accounting firm or in-house at any company, and be earning about $60k a year.
And if college isn't for you, you can become an electrician's apprentice. Earn about $40k a year while you learn how to be a fully licensed electrician. Then after 4 years, you get licensed and can double your money.
Ideally, you should choose the thing that can provide you a decent living while leveraging your skills and/or talents without overworking you.
But eSports doesn't provide a decent living on average. And it overworks everyone.
And that kind of ignores that ability and/or skill is only part of it. The people who are currently the best in areas where the money isn't there are only the best of the people who can be bothered to do it. The hypothetical best CounterStrike player possible probably does not even play the game. Because somewhere, early in the sieve, they did the math and realized the effort required to maintain their position was not worth the reward for doing so. And it could have been when they were the best Quake deathmatcher on their dorm floor. They realized they could continue playing or study for midterms. And they chose their midterms because that was going to secure the bag.
I was picking a random low remuneration sport and suggesting they have a skillset that could have transferred to a different one. It was a broad example for "choosing between sports is a real conceptual thing that athletes who go pro have implicitly done, though they may not have ever considered the options because they were on a path".
> Second. It's not a choice between eSports and traditional sports.
The thread above me is literally acting as though it's a comparison between the two paths being offered. It obviously is not, they're wildly different skillsets.
All that said, obviously eSports is a terrible life choice rationally, unless you want to spend your "working" life doing a thing you love rather than earning maximal money per unit effort. I respect people who do that, as a rule.
As an aside, professional badminton, specifically, is one of those things I think where you wake up some days and realize the very specific things in your life that had to happen to put you where you are. Not something you seek out deliberately.
And I'm not even saying they considered other non-sports options. I'm essentially calling it a stupid decision to not do so. These are people, at least in the eSports/CCG scene, who talk a lot about the expected values of things. And the expected value of a pro eSports/CCG pro career is not good.
And I never said anything about "earning maximal money per unit effort". I said provide a decent living while not overworking you. In eSports, you have to "earn maximal money per unit effort" just to make a living. I'm saying, they should choose a vocation where they can earn better money for less effort units.
I guess what I really meant is that maybe tennis pays better than squash or badminton, but uses very similar skillsets. I was not in anyway proposing they could play in the NFL specifically (hence saying "some other sport")
My claim was basically pro sports people are naturally talented at sports - and which sport they ended up playing pro was more likely to be circumstance than considered choice.
The rest is you just doubling down on "people should choose jobs not passions". Sure, if you like.
I still doubt that. I even doubt that the majority of them could transfer to tennis.
Because there are levels to sports. And it's largely based on where the money is.
And I'm saying you shouldn't sacrifice yourself for your passions.
It’s been a while since I followed eSports (League of Legends in 2011-2014?), but all the US and EU players (after getting kicked in the butt by Asian teams who already did it like that) got people that made sure their players would have healthy lifestyles, eating properly, getting enough exercise etc.
I don't think it's fair, from at least two angles:
- these people work in a niche, and applying generic takes to very specific situations is hit or miss.
- people in similar niches don't follow the generic statement. For instance pro bowling players usually earn more from their side gig than from bowling. A decent amount of top athletes competing in sports belonging to the long tail fall into this category.
Here's the documentary (it's kind of more of a commercial but it's still pretty good if you're interested in esports)
The WaPo article seems to imply that is not true.
Also, in Formula 1 reflexes, hand-eye coordination, reaction time, etc. are all extremely important.
Despite that, a driver will typically be at their peak in their early-mid 30s.
On other hand there is lot of value with experience and some patience, if you are mid-line team a experienced driver who can support the team and bring the car back in whole or even with some points race after race is not horrible investment.
1. In some roles and metas, the split second mechanical difference does matter i.e. for carries or mid-lane playmakers under specific metas and specific matchups. Although some metas are less mechanically deep for certain roles -- I know part of the theory for Dendi's decline is that his mechanical skill was overkill when denies in midlane (very timing based mechanic) became less important compared to macrostrategy (meaning that he couldn't just 'out skill' opponents and win the game with an early lead).
2. But, the experience gains from being in competitions for a long time make the older players a great fit for coaching, captain, and support roles.
3. But another factor is less reaction time and more that the late 20s and early 30s players have spouses and more expansive lives beyond the game, so they simply cannot spend the 100+ hours a week perfectly tuning the midlane or hard carry meta where the fundamentals can change really fast. Also, for the most successful players (read: millionaires) they want to enjoy their wealth and do things outside the game.
I think this is the biggest factor in the same way most devs don't stay in the same job for 20 years (particularly the top ones!).
Additionally, most games change a lot over their lifespan; what made someone a top player in the early days doesn't necessarily continue to benefit them now, and mindset/skillset changes are not easy to make. Poker is a great example of that: pros from 20 years ago might have experience, but if they're not up-to-date with the cutting edge of theory and solvers, their 'experience' will get them crushed.
Otherwise, yeah, you can be Divine/Immortal using game knowledge and have terrible reaction times relative to the greater player base.
I'm immortal ranked Dota player, that spends 10 hours a week playing Dota. And has played DOTA since Warcraft 3. My reaction time is slow, because I think so much about each situations. And a slightly bad decision can lose the whole game. When I see my team fighting, I take a short look, maybe think for as long as 2-3 seconds and make a decision about if I can contribute to the fight or if I will just be feeding.
DOTA is a lot more about strategy, positioning, how to pressure, farming patterns, vision/warding, when to use power spikes and be a team player. This is also why experienced players beat the crap out of younger players and probably also why younger players play something else than DOTA/MOBA.
> And a slightly bad decision can lose the whole game.
A slightly bad reaction time can lose an entire game. When you're looking at pro games - where real money is on the line - you want the player who has the same decision making ability as other highly ranked players but ALSO the ability to react really quickly. Failed to disjoint a projectile in time? International lost. Didn't pop your BKB in time? International lost. Didn't hex a puck or ember fast enough? International lost.
Like, sure, again... you can go really far in dota with poor reaction speed. I'm 30, for example. But when it comes down to creating a five man team to compete for money then very few teams are going to pick up older players on the chance that they might not react fast enough. Old man fear was called old man fear for a reason.
Also, this makes me really curious about what the age composition is for immortal top 100s for each region. How many are there over the age of 30?
The only "game" I can think of which is close is war.
Also, the writer makes constant comparisons to NFL, but different sports like gymnastics have even more extremely young, short and destructive carreers than eSports.
Likewise, esports used to be a fun thing that friends would do for fun money back in the day. You wouldn’t put crazy time into it because you still had a day job and $1,000 winnings won’t pay rent for long. Now, these e-athletes are practicing 12+ hours a day. There’s no healthy way to play video games 12+ hours a day, no matter how much you’re getting paid.
Until we remove the monetary incentive such that these unrealistic hours aren’t put into children’s games, we’re going to continue to see these athletes self-destruct their lives with these ridiculous regimens.
Larry Bird may not have fit the athletic build, but he absolutely practiced year round. He was famously discipline about shooting daily, etc...
Players like the above were great because they loved the game. It was part of them, and in the case of Bird, his body paid the price. The advances that have been made (when to practice, when to rest, nutrition, etc...) let players play and practice year round with a structure that also lets them play longer careers.
[1] https://brobible.com/sports/article/michael-jordan-bulls-con...
I think I've also seen some talk about how even a few years of age can affect how fast your reflexes are, in terms of actions per minute, etc. But that more experienced players can do more with less APM.
Taking away or breaking up the best times of eSports players certainly isn't helping their career length.
Whilst in esports, what you were good at, say farming creeps in Dota 2 or sniping in CSGO, could get nerfed to the ground in the next patch. Thus all your skills disappear.
- outdated takes - talks about "esports" like it is a monolithic, Dota 2 and LoL are not fighting games and fighting games are not Classic Tetris, and Classic Tetris is not speedruns. - Implicitly equating NFL to sports, NFL is one sports, and there is many others. - Implicitly equating esports to games and hobbies where having kids and family must stop you from playing 8 hours a day to stay on shape. Like not all society does that? no one else has kids and a job?
I am familiar with Dota 2 and LoL, those 2 do pay well in term of salary, Dota 2 in addition to salary has really high prize pools. The salaries are mainly prompted up by sponsors, mainly betting websites sponsors.
I feel like esports have the potential to be enormous but won't reach that until standard formats are established. I'm thinking some FIFA, FIA, IOC, etc., -type group releasing spec sheets and FOSS client/server implementations that developers then port into their own engines. The idea being that the barrier to entry is so low that anyone can experience the game. It's not a coincidence that the most popular sport in the world is also the most accessible.
This is usually the part of the HN comment where I plug my startup that solves the exact problem, but sadly that's not the case today.
Physical sports are limited by physics and are certain ways because humans cannot fly or revive at a spawn point. Those are practical limitations and many rules are there to reduce injury.
Limiting eSports to committee-designed clean room games that only change every few years will take the whole fun of "everything is possible" out of it.
It's completely okay for gamers to play their favorite game. Just as people rather play football or cricket instead of baseball or rugby.
On the other hand I will never know what it feels like to drive F1, so even though on the whole it's more impressive to drive a F1 car around the track, it will not amaze me as a StarCraft pro picking apart a Marine-Tank line, because I've tried to do that so many times I know exactly how hard it is.
So esports audiences mainly watch what they're playing, and it's better for it, and they won't be playing some standardized game.
> Even ppl who suck at gaming are making huge income with streaming
Who? Ppl who suck at gaming but have a big audience have other skills (e.g. they are entertaining).
(And for more context behind that, which I love because they actually got Justin Wong, Chun Li's player, to comment on it, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cNCa8PylLA)
There are a bunch of analysis videos on youtube about how vast his game knowledge is and how quick and precise his reaction time is to perform this maneuver. Very similar to moment #37, just years later.
That implies that overlong practice hours aren't improving the players. If the practice hours did improve them, they ought to be much better at 25 than at 20.
It could be that the practice hours are maintenance, but then we might imagine that the practice could be better designed.
- the position of 2-4 players around the map
- the timers of different camps (NPCs the players kill for buffs)
- the locations of enemy wards (timed items that give vision)
- short ability timers and (+ need to know them for all possible characters)
- long ability timers ( many pro plays happen exactly as the timers are up )
The teams are investing in trainers (as in going to the gym) and the like, but the players often still have issues. It's also not helped by the fact that, based on my admittedly outside observations, few if any were all-star conventional athletes who had to decide between collegiate swimming or the like and eSports.
t. I have a relative who is a prominent pro in one of the big leagues.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-04-27-hai-lam-league-of-legend...
Quote2:"This stands in stark contrast to traditional sports. The NBA’s average player age is 26, according to a 2021 survey and even in the super-demanding NFL, the average player retires between age 26 and 27, per the NFL Players Association."
I don't know Washington Post (& Jonathan Lee, the article's author), seems you kind of dropped the ball here.
Then the point is driven home by comparing with (in their eyes) one of the most physically demanding sports/leagues - the NFL - where players apparently still retire a little later than esports people
It's maybe clumsily presented, but it does demonstrate how esports is a peculiar case that doesn't necessarily follow expectations.
This makes for a natural career transition for esports players that doesn’t really exist in traditional sports.
It's widely accepted that men are bigger and stronger than women; a woman couldn't be a quarterback in the NFL because of the danger of injuries.
In the case of e-Sports physical size and strength don't matter so much so you'd think women could advance further. Practically they don't so one is left wondering if this is because fewer women get started in e-Sports, they run into various problems that cause them to drop out, or maybe there are differences in performance like there are in regular sports.
Frequently though, when people are asking the question "Why don't women do X?" and you look closely at X, you start to ask the question "Why do men do X?" That is, X is demanding, doesn't pay that well, it doesn't look like a career you'd choose unless you got typecast into it.
(For instance I think of a certain camera store in Manhattan where all the employees wear the uniform of a certain religious-ethnic group. Are members of this group getting a good deal when they work at this camera store or is the camera store getting a good deal hiring members of this group? Or neither? Or both?)
Another factor is that both men and women can make money streaming without participating in e-Sports tournaments. Certainly some people are interested in watching people play games even if they aren't good at them
https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Kizuna_Ai
my son and I have thought about making a channel where we mock single-player games that we play but we figure it's a crowded market. This guy is 33 years old
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuronPlay
and has 17.6 million subscribers on Twitch and is ranked #2 among Twitch streamers on Wikipedia. This 25 year old woman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokimane
has 9 million subscribers on Twitch and is ranked #9 by Wikipedia. She has participated in tournaments but I don't know if that really moves the needle in terms of following and revenue for somebody like that.
Tons of women play video games these days, but online multiplayer games are still quite a bit of a boy's club. It seems like a similar situation with engineering schools/jobs: it's dominated by awkward men and remains so due to a negative feedback loop.
I know a woman who works in HR at a large engineering adjacent organization and I'd say (in my experience dealing with her outside of work) she consistently makes mistakes in dealing with awkward people (such as attempting flattery and making people feel worse.) Since non-awkward people get to define what "empathy" means and because awkward people are defined deficient fundamentally, she and people in her profession systematically erase these mistakes. (We did what we were told to do in school, what is on the checklist, what the diversity plan says "empathy" is, ...)
She probably gets good performance reviews but she finds her job really stressful. It might be intrinsic that the job is stressful (it is dealing with other people's bullshit after all) but it might be that she's not really that good at it. She follows the checklists that other people give her, but nobody really asked her customers what they think.
It could be that professions like that could use a good dose of awkward people or at least people who can have real empathy for awkward people instead of a show of empathy that's directed at impressing somebody else.
You have to win to earn money in esports right?
It seems like the difference in professional athletics is you’ve got a somewhat predictable income at some point.
depends - if your team pays you a salary, then no. But if you never win, either the team can't get sponsorship (since noone will watch a team that doesn't win), or the team fires you (and get a better player).
Prize money is only one source of income, and i suspect not even the major one for most teams. It's sponsorships and ads.
I dont think it's a dumb question! These things are often shrouded in secrecy imho - and it makes it hard for young, new players to know whether it's a good path for them or not. There's nothing to compare it with! I favour transparency tbh.
a lot of esports teams work like a business - they hire workers who "produce" something and sell it for a profit. in this case, it's advertising.
This is why you see players wearing a jersey/tshirt that has tonnes of logos and such, and their player names will have advertising/branding on it (gfuel being the big one i see often).
The team pays a salary to the players, and takes the sponsorship money (and the difference, if any, is profit). The players generally also get a share of the prize money too - which is like an incentive bonus to perform well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serral#/media/File:Serral_2018...
The only sponsors I see are Asus, Republic of Gamers (an Asus brand), and I think there's a Telia logo on his sleeve. Granted, SC2 isn't that popular, but that's all the sponsorship you need to pay salaries?
>You have to win to earn money in esports right? You have a salary, then if you win in Dota 2's case you take the whole prize money, in some other games you take some of it.
>It seems like the difference in professional athletics is you’ve got a somewhat predictable income at some point. The info in the article seem to be outdated, any serious esports today give you a stable income. The salaries are actually competitive, team today have big sponsors, and the sponsors pay most of the players' salary, so it gets super competitive between teams to get certain players.
Before this was common, you've seem all-star teams more often, nowadays players have to balance between being in a team that has a shot of taking the world championship and being in the team that pay the most.
Must be noted that one of the biggest drivers of salaries being really high in esports is betting websites as sponsors.
It’s been 15 years. I don’t understand why they don’t want to make another billion off this franchise in that timeframe.
That there's a, and i quote, "careers" in video | computer gaming.
Isn't that enough?
- genewitch