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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>Broadcasting gameplay has become a big business

Most of esports is not profitable. Events are usually run for the love of the game as opposed to trying to make money. Or there is VC money which they are unlikely to find a return on.

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Most esports is marketing by the game developer, produced at a loss to retain player interest and sell the dream. Having pros to watch makes the game more fun and feel legitimate. There's a reason casters hype player skill non-stop.

Ex. Valorant, Overwatch, WoW, LoL (maybe actually profitable?), DotA.

Scenes actually run for the love of the game are Melee + anything tiny

The only independent esport that is kinda self-sustaining is Korean Brood War, been divorced from blizzard for a long time and still going strong w sponsorships and ad revenue.

DotA has a healthy number of tournaments that aren't hosted by Valve, but a concerning number of those are heavily sponsored by esports betting companies. When (not "if") regulation closes in on that industry, the scene may look very different.

Melee scene is getting killed by both Nintendo and the biggest organizators too :(

But yeah, fighting games scenes are actually quite durable and rising up from grassroots in general

CS:GO is self sustaining.

Yep, one game I follow Hearthstone Battlegrounds has had a majority of funding for events slashed by Activision Blizzard. Very unfortunate for the professional players who are incentivised more to be successful streamers rather than competitive gamers and us fans.

If you are disputing the whole point of the article directly like that, you'll have to provide a source.

There's a lot of sponsor money involved, big organizations with multiple teams for different games traveling to large events. Doesn't sound like they are all doing it for the love of the game.

There's single teams that are valued > $500m: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/esports-ecosyst...

Private valuations are nonsense. FaZe went public via a SPAC and is now down by ~95%.

10x Revenue multiple is insane on those valuations. Most of those teams are barely 10 years old, and mostly unprofitable through their tenure. I think we're starting to see a rational market take over with FaZe going from 750m+ market cap to ~30m.

>There's a lot of sponsor money involved, big organizations with multiple teams for different games traveling to large events.

Just because there is a lot of money moving around it doesn't mean it's profitable in general.

>Doesn't sound like they are all doing it for the love of the game.

Doing it in hopes of making a return on investment doesn't guarantee you will be profitable.

>There's single teams that are valued > $500m

A lot of those numbers are inflated. As the sister comments mention look at what happened to faze.

Rocket league for one receives sponsorship from car companies, nike, movie studios, and even football clubs regularly. Their nike paint finishes were selling like hot cakes.

Notice how the game company is the one making the money. Tournament organizers, server admins, production, casters, players, managers, etc do not have a sustainable source of money. Often people volunteer their services and communities fundraise money to fly teams in to compete because that's the only way they can afford it.

>Most of esports is not profitable. Events are usually run for the love of the game as opposed to trying to make money

That can be said about any sport. Broadcasting football is big business but most teams are not profitable and the players play for the love of the sport as opposed to trying to make money

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