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Paid to Play Video Games
acehole writes "This would have to be every gamer's dream, to get paid for playing games. In South Korea gaming has taken off to an extent that companies sponsor gaming teams (some earn up to $100k per year) to play games up to 12 hours a day."
their are q3a tourneys. UT tourneys. i didn't RTFA but over here it seems you make money off of game when you have skill. of course your skill doesn't matter when your title is "Game Tester"
Send your resume to Playboy, I hear they're hiring for the position of "Hef".
Yes. Excessive Gamer dies. But its not just in Korea... Boy exhausted after mammoth CS session
Team3D is sponsored by CompUSA and nVidia.
Sounds like my freshman year of college.
More seriously though, 12 hours a day at a job in Korea doesn't seem like such a big deal. I have a friend from Korea who moved here about 25 years ago. He says he gets calls from friends at home who are about to go back to work at about 1am their time, having just worked MORE than a full day already. It seems like adults there do almost nothing BUT work -- literally, not like "workaholics" over here. 12 hours a day doesn't seem so bad compared to that.
-"It seems like you're trying to exploit a security hole. Would you like help?"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/handle-generic-f orm/102-1774762-2876143?action=next-page&target=we b-search/redirect.html&title=PXA255%20SBC%20runs%2 0%3Cb%3ELinux%3C/b%3E&url=http%3A//www.google.com/ url%3Fq%3Dhttp%3A//www.goatse.cx/&intel_xscale_p%2 6sa%3Dl%26ai%3DAyrRiR1Xt_UfpkMLkdY6vYDsDW6b_CI8hqa AjNCZPCMg2RBAoRnRADMAmWAA%26num%3D3&hshs.url=http: //www.strategic-test.com&ws_type=bks_dp_ads&ws_pos ition=3
It is pretty interesting. There are two channels in Daegu (central Korea) that broadcast games all day. Besides matches, they also have review roundup shows, shows that show off the latest in hardware, etc. They also show the odd in-game movie, and sometimes even re-enact a player going through a level in some adventure game, with voice-over dialogue which I assume is meant to be comedy (not knowing the language really well, I only have tone of voice to work with...).
Starcraft: They LOVE Starcraft. Besides tournaments -- which normally have a small but knowlegable live audience that knows when something big has happened and cheers along, and end with final knock-out games being played before a massive audience in an arena -- they also have programs that compare tactics and units -- you have to be able to understand Korean well to get the most of it, but they had visual displays showing the different kinds of damage that a different attack could cause. They built a bunch of buildings in close proximity and launched a nuke at it to show what sort of damage you could expect to see, they lined up a bunch of small units in a row to show how the different kinds of Zerg splash damage worked... They really take this stuff seriously. The popularity of Starcraft is such that the war chest, which has been out for years now, is still consistently amongst the top sellers and hasn't had its price reduced to the bargain bin yet. The commentators in the show are pretty good about locating where the action is on a big map and taking the spectator there to watch. They'll even switch to the different players' views, and let me tell you, those guys move and react quickly!
They're trying to bring in more competitive FPS and RTS matches, both for PC and console, but for whatever reason, because none of the games have the long-term penetration that Starcraft has had, what ends up happening is that one player comes along who dominates pretty quickly and is on every week. Because of the culture of PC rooms though, where every public machine in the country is likely to have Starcraft on it, there's a much larger talent pool to draw from, which has probably lead to the evolution of clanning into corporate team sponsorship.
These shows also serve as great ads for the product. Because I'm not much for consuming games and like to pick and choose, these shows are great previews for what the gameplay is like and whether or not the game is deep enough to play. I'm glad I never bought into the Halo on XBox hype, not saying it's not an excellent game, but the Halo show gave me a good idea of what to expect in terms of multiplayer and gameplay dynamics, and that stuff isn't really for me. One drawback of the shows is that they don't really give you an idea of what non-multiplayer games are like, as well as only give you an idea of what graphics are like in MMO games. Maybe it's better if you can understand Korean, I don't know...
Common tactic in Starcraft -- send your eighth builder out to find the enemy base, and just build a Vespian gas extractor. Which leads to common counter-tactic, cheap buildings that can block that builder. After that, it's just an all out competition to out-produce the enemy, and spying on the enemy's forces to figure out what units you'll have the most luck in combatting them with.
If you think the players look silly in the Starcraft uniforms, wait until you see what they have to wear for WWE matches.