I have personally found this issue growing more apparent, when gaming starts encroaching too much on our personal lives. Can it ever really be considered a life choice or career?
I only say this off the back of receiving a job offer this afternoon that would slightly restrict my rather tight schedule as it is. I depend on the fact I can personally promote myself during my lunch breaks and keep in contact with most on skype during the day to ease my work load when im home.
I feel it when I’m unable to go and be with the person I’m rather close to due to me having DreamHack Valencia on all weekend followed by cups followed by more and by the time I’m done its 1.00am and I’m hardly a bundle of fun to be around.
My schedule aside, where do we draw the line? I have seen some of the best gamers out there utterly ruining their academic path by being so focused towards gaming. Is there a point someone should tell you to stop being so involved in something so short term within your life or should you pursue what you love with your full intentions.
You only need to look around at the people making a living from gaming to see it as appealing. Who wouldn’t want to make a good wage playing games? With streaming now being available to anyone out there with the possible chance of making money off that if you are good enough or even just funny enough to bring in a audience we are seeing a influx in people doing just that.
The likes of Curse & EG flaunt their rather opulent lifestyle surrounding gaming even to the extent of having gaming houses in the prestigious Beverly Hills.
to quote forbes.com - First Look Inside The Curse League Of Legends Beverly Hills Gaming House
Clearly showing the benefit of following your passions towards eSports… but Professional gaming for me ended when I couldn’t fathom coming home from one job to do what felt like another. The likes of Stephano and many more show that dedication and ability can create something special, but how many of you would ever be the next Stephano or Fatal1ty? The likely answer is none.
You see this issue riddled throughout the gaming scene you only need to look over to the recent twitter outburst from Leigh “Deman” Smith …
Leigh Smith @qvDeman
From my short time casting and covering events I already feel the slight strain of it upon my day to day job. I can only imagine the constant strain it would have for someone with a real busy schedule.
I must explain the point this is not about the casual gamer who clearly had personally issues to run from and fully emerge every part of their life in gaming and suffer from that, this is about the more aware “eSports” savvy gamer that could possibly transition into something more lucrative.
Another point I might eventually write about was rather pushed to me by a tweet from Mike Rufail (eSports Advisor @treyarch)
Mike Rufail @hastr0
This echoed personally with me after I felt myself rattling off the sponsor lines second to none promoting products I have not tried nor tested. I felt fake as anything at that point and genuinely had to reconsider what I was doing. Where do the lines get blurred and we lose the pure intentions and it all becomes about money.
The point being, gaming is part of our daily lives but where should it stay for the vast majority of us.
I pose the question to you, the reader. Would you EVER consider focusing yourself towards eSports within a career choice? Did you ever find yourself putting gaming in front of matters it should not proceed?
I only say this off the back of receiving a job offer this afternoon that would slightly restrict my rather tight schedule as it is. I depend on the fact I can personally promote myself during my lunch breaks and keep in contact with most on skype during the day to ease my work load when im home.
I feel it when I’m unable to go and be with the person I’m rather close to due to me having DreamHack Valencia on all weekend followed by cups followed by more and by the time I’m done its 1.00am and I’m hardly a bundle of fun to be around.
My schedule aside, where do we draw the line? I have seen some of the best gamers out there utterly ruining their academic path by being so focused towards gaming. Is there a point someone should tell you to stop being so involved in something so short term within your life or should you pursue what you love with your full intentions.
You only need to look around at the people making a living from gaming to see it as appealing. Who wouldn’t want to make a good wage playing games? With streaming now being available to anyone out there with the possible chance of making money off that if you are good enough or even just funny enough to bring in a audience we are seeing a influx in people doing just that.
The likes of Curse & EG flaunt their rather opulent lifestyle surrounding gaming even to the extent of having gaming houses in the prestigious Beverly Hills.
to quote forbes.com - First Look Inside The Curse League Of Legends Beverly Hills Gaming House
Clearly showing the benefit of following your passions towards eSports… but Professional gaming for me ended when I couldn’t fathom coming home from one job to do what felt like another. The likes of Stephano and many more show that dedication and ability can create something special, but how many of you would ever be the next Stephano or Fatal1ty? The likely answer is none.
You see this issue riddled throughout the gaming scene you only need to look over to the recent twitter outburst from Leigh “Deman” Smith …
Leigh Smith @qvDeman
From my short time casting and covering events I already feel the slight strain of it upon my day to day job. I can only imagine the constant strain it would have for someone with a real busy schedule.
I must explain the point this is not about the casual gamer who clearly had personally issues to run from and fully emerge every part of their life in gaming and suffer from that, this is about the more aware “eSports” savvy gamer that could possibly transition into something more lucrative.
Another point I might eventually write about was rather pushed to me by a tweet from Mike Rufail (eSports Advisor @treyarch)
Mike Rufail @hastr0
This echoed personally with me after I felt myself rattling off the sponsor lines second to none promoting products I have not tried nor tested. I felt fake as anything at that point and genuinely had to reconsider what I was doing. Where do the lines get blurred and we lose the pure intentions and it all becomes about money.
The point being, gaming is part of our daily lives but where should it stay for the vast majority of us.
I pose the question to you, the reader. Would you EVER consider focusing yourself towards eSports within a career choice? Did you ever find yourself putting gaming in front of matters it should not proceed?
Yes, years ago and I totally regret it.
Now having a steady and enjoyable job with good money and a company that PAYS me to study/further my education, i could not complain. Apart from being some major celebrity in sports or some other crap, the only career i would probably swap for my current would be in the world of gaming/esports - especially if ET would have took off like SC2 or LoL etc.
I can say after putting in a lot of time and effort into ET/eSports/Crossfire that i really dont have the time or motivation to look at it as a hobby or convince myself that I would make a living out of it hence my lack on involvement in Crossfire or ET outside of playing. I tried to muddle and mix my busy work schedules and responsibilities with aiding Crossfire and ET in the form of BFB2 and initially it gave me some kind of buzz yet once it finished i realised that it was just a burden and the time and effort that I/we put into it was not really worth it outside of it being an amazing tournament to play.
Normally i would have jumped at this "Crossfire Contribution" not for the prizes, but just to aid, but not anymore.
I would like to have made gaming into a career, because it can be one which you can profit from majorly, but i can safely say i enjoy my current career
- all these articles are prior to the "event" of content starting, mostly i will focus towards CS:GO for that anyway
Don't really think this is the right place to ask anyways, since most people here play ET and if they wanted to make careers out of games, they would go play Counterstrike or CoD or whatever the fuck is played nowadays.
Which game was it you played bar ET at a good level i do recall you did at some point?
I intend to take my CS:GO coverage to a point next month.
gaming as a career is of course short-sighted. if you are one of the best players in a game that actually features competition (like sc2), you might be able to cash in for a while - until e.g. a nerf hits or the support for a game is discontinued.
e-sports is not just like your regular sport as well: in football there are no companies like blizzard who want to sell a new brand or a new game to the masses every once in a while. as long as it's just like that you will have kids in their early 20s throwing away easily the most precious and important time of their lives (this holds true even for the small number of gamers actually earning some money from playing).
good luck finding the answer, which is, what is more important for u in life? having fun on the inet (nothing wrong with that) or making an impressive career.
Unless you are chinese or japanese this is just a another stupid journal !
Gratz :)
One would like to think this is the attitude that leads to greater things, but in the meantime, am having a blast with no regrets at all :)
(interesting discussion though. and grats on the job Pansy!)
Back when the old boys club as its recently been come to be called was getting started, well actually about 18 months in, GGL started splashing some cash. They had already hired djWHEAT and both myself and ReDeYe were up for roles in LA. I was 19 at the time, doing my first year of university. I had just started going to events, my first was WCG 2004 Finals in San Fransisco, it was absolutely incredible. The opening night myself and djwheat did a private shoutcast for city officials at City hall and the show closed with the FIFA finals to what was my first stage crowd of about 1000. It was incredible, I'd never have believed when I was flaming on the jolt RTCW forums and xfire that it'd ever come to this. By WCG 2005 in Singapore I was talking to GGL about moving to LA. I spent the following summer out in LA working with Wheat and had started the application for a visa and agreed a salary. I'd already said goodbye to my friends at university. I was however by the end of that summer having second thoughts on GGL and their commitment to iTG and the projects I would be working on. After quite a debate in my head, I decided to give the opportunity a miss.
In hindsight, boy did I dodge a bullet. I finished university and then went to work for briefly Heaven Media and then as a consultant to a number of eSports companies. It was TOUGH going. In those days eSports companies were entirely driven by sponsorship revenue, which gets paid often quarterly, meaning cashflow is always tight. If you don't have a credit card to mitigate cashflow, you can't fly solo in eSports. It didn't help that this was also timed with the financial crisis and nobody had any money. I and others were asking people for money they didn't have and until the advent of streaming, they couldn't metrics they couldn't monetise.
In 2009, I thought F this, I like eSports but it can drive you insane - you're often working with kids and you're always paid late. I moved on and started a 'real' career. I got a great position of responsibility within a well funded tech startup in London. We worked on encoding technology for video delivery. The security of that job and the occasion bit of eSports paid work on the side allowed be to balance the books and get a mortgage. The refreshing change of being paid on the first of the month and working in a professional industry was great.
Fast forward to 2011 and one of my clients in that company was MLG and it was a gateway back to a world through both friends and Crossfire I had never fully left. With the MLG project I used to manage their video player, satellite delivery, downlink and encoding - a team of people in New York & Russia and though we were hugely sucessful I was looking at Tasteless and Wheat who I'd known for now 8+ years and feeling like for the right opportunity I still had something I wanted to achieve in eSports.
In January of this year I started looking elsewhere for a job, for a new challenge and eSports was a firm consideration. In London there's not a huge volume of technology companies to move from, you can move into advertising technologies but flogging PPC technology is dull! I had a couple of offers within eSports and own3D was one of them which I eventually took up. At own3D you have the pitfalls and the benefits of a small company, we can move so quickly to get things done but we are of course vulnerable like any other, particularly in a market where your competitor is so well funded.
eSports has matured from the early days, things are better - but they cannot replace the security of non eSports companies. I was chatting with ReDeYe this past weekend in Valencia and he was telling me his hankering for coming back. My advice was don't and I would say the same to anyone that has a stable job and has people dependent (children/wifes) on them.
For yourself however who is young and has not yet popped a sprog, you could enjoy huge freedom and experience things you'd never get elsewhere. I have, and you can to, travel the world to more places than you'll ever remember. You'll experience responsibility beyond your years and have the chance to impact a generational shift. If a chance comes your way, and you've vetted the company well - take the risk, you're only young once.
The biggest catch for me is the questionable longevity of the (eSports) gaming market, one of the coolest things about it also makes me personally always want to avoid it in a working aspect... the fact its always evolving. I only have to look at the risk Leigh is possibly making and id never have the guts to do it because who knows a year down the line if LoL will still be that popular and there isn't a new game on the block that for some reason don't like what you do.
Nice to hear from le' Stupots world !
oh and whats your university degree?
eSports, Sports, Music, Art etc. all require 100% dedication, talent etc. if you want to succeed (rather than just staying in school and doing what your teachers want you to do so you get good grades > university and get a "regular" job).
It is also the same problems that face kids (or adults) when they do not succeed. The major difference with eSports being that there is only one level of success in terms of true financial security and even that is all too unstable/unreliable.
At least with other professions if you do not make the top echelon you can still make enough money to live on (depending on your needs and wants ofc!).
Its fun to have a team and go to lans and maybe earn some extra cash, but seeing for example the people from sc2 i would not like to live like that. Also there is the biggest downside of esports: Your sponsor/boss dont wants to support that game anymore you will have to adept to it and go pro in a other which you may not like or lose your "O so great job ".
Btw would also mean you will have to work in weekend :)
Im ~2.1k soloq player in League of Legends and im not even close being somehow great and followed player still the idea of me being at top makes push towards. My dream is to make some euros from gaming even if its like 5€, god sake it would feel great to earn it from "just" playing games.