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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The flip side is that compensation is not terribly attractive to the players.

I’ve heard that players are dropping out at young ages not because they can’t play anymore but because it is not a good living.

I had a LoL habit for a while. I was definitely a fan of Yiliang Peng but spent a lot more time playing LoL than I did watching the pros. I don’t think I generated much if any revenue for his team. There is not a big money train like there is for the NFL.

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I only follow pubg esports, but I'm just not seeing how a pro player in an expensive country can afford to make a living. The competition is brutal, the hours to be at the top are very high, and unless you're a top streamer the income is very low.

Now this can all be hand waved away with "they're just playing a video game, they're lucky" but I think that misses the point. To be a pro at one game, you have to dedicate everything to that game. Revenue sharing has to go up for longevity of esports.

Isn't the very definition of 'pro' that they get paid to do it? Prize money, sure, but also sponsors.

You can get paid without getting paid well.

Take [1] as a random example - 18th in the pubg global championship, and they've made $53k split between 3 players in 2022.

How many hours of practice do you think they have to put in, to be 18th in the global championship and earn $17.7k per person?

[1] https://liquipedia.net/pubg/BBL_Esports

Aren't they getting a salary for those hours of practice? That's what I mean with pro, as in professional, as in having gaming as their profession.

Honestly, $17.7k for _18th_ place, in PUBG of all games, seems very high to me as a prize. But I am sure they split a lot of that with their organization, coaches and whatever they have, and taxes on top of that.

Even so, people work for minimum wage so it all just, depends.

A lot of the teams aren't organizations, and the ones who are can sometimes get pretty low salaries, from what I understand. With how much movement there is in the leaderboard year to year, the team who came in first in 2020 placed last in 2021.

For how many hours of time played, it's well below minimum wage. And of course it is different, playing a game has plenty of benefits, I'm just thinking about longevity of esports as a whole.

I don't believe that's per person, that's total for the team. So <18k for 4 players and a coach. The tournament went for 20 days, so missing out on any income you could generate from another job during that time, excluding the coach that's 4.5k per tax, on the largest money making opportunity all year.

I don't know anything about e-sports, but I know something about professional sports - and the prize money at the top end is small compared with the endorsements. Tiger Woods only made 10% of his fortune in prize money, for example.

And yet he made $120,895,206 in tournament winnings. It just emphasizes both that the orders of magnitude is nowhere the same in the direct compensation side, and a universe of difference on the sponsorship side.

> and unless you're a top streamer the income is very low.

For rocket league, the content creation scene is much bigger than the pro scene. As a developer once said, is very GIFable. Combined with the flexibility of the game itself, you see nearly endless possibilities for content creation. More than half of the top content creators for this game are "casual" players[1]. Casual is quoted because they're still grand champion level but nowhere near the pro level. There are also pros turned content creators that are familiar with unreal engine and create really cool stuff (eg lethamyr). On the other end of the spectrum is sunless khan who creates video essays about rocket league[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rocket+league&s...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuV2SGAZaig

Rocket League is very watchable by people unfamiliar with it too. It's just Pong in 3D. It's 3v3, and you can manipulate the paddle in very creative ways, but it's basically just as simple.

I was pretty much done with gaming until I found Rocket League. It's one-of-a-kind in so many ways, I'm not sure it'll ever be outdone. If it can't survive an industry crash, I don't think any eSport game will.

The reality is that top players can make more from streaming/content than playing. To take your Doublelift example he has been full time streaming for 2 years but is coming back to LCS this year. He's taking a massive paycut by playing LCS vs. full time streaming/content.

These inflated pro salaries are good for the lower tier players who don't have the entertainer personality

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