Slashdot Mirror
Become a Professional Gamer
introverted writes "An article in the Wall Street Journal covers events in South Korea, where, even more so than the U.S., there are increasingly highly paid professional teams competing in games such as Blizzard's StarCraft. The article notes: 'Last year, [pro StarCraft gamer] Lim Yo-Hwan made about $300,000 from player fees and commercials. Another top earner, Hung Jin-Ho, whose fingers are insured for $60,000, recently signed a three-year deal with telecom provider KTF Co. that will pay him $480,000 altogether.' So now you can claim your time gaming as 'job skills training'!"
Alternately, I could make a good salary working 8-5 in an intellectually challenging field and save the gaming for its true purpose: a hobby.
I don't want to imagine a world where videogames cease being fun because I need to keep winning to put food in my belly.
Just a thought.
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
Just like professional athelets, you may be able to get a whole lot of money for playing a game, but the competition is fierce, and you have to be really good to do it. Not to mention that there is probably no long term viability as you age and your reflexes go south. It will happen eventually.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
You must remember, becoming a professional gamer bears it's burdens... "OMG CHEATER! HACKER! BAN HIM!!!1111"
You're better off becoming a professional musician or pro athelete than a pro gamer.
Sure, the TOP GAMERS make over 200k a year (BTW - being a pro gamer also means you need to buy bleeding edge technology, so that 200k isn't much after you subtract your monthly computer upgrade budget), but most hardly make any... not to mention that you not only have to be fabulous with one game, but with at least one new game ever year or so. If you take a break, or have an off year or two, you are in debt.
I'll stick to my day job, thanks.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the best pieces of advice I have read: Don't make your hobby your job. Except in extremely rare cases, you will start hating your hobby. I have investigated a few alternative jobs in the last few years including photographer, videographer/moviemaker, professional gambler, scuba diving instructor, commercial diver, motorcycle build/repair, vehicle spraypainter. All of these things have been/still are hobbies and I have stopped myself every time, because I know that as soon as I start in a new career I will hate that hobby.
I used to love computers btw.
Gaming is for fun, not work. I am a StarCraft fan, yes, in fact after this comment I'll be playing it (whiteraven710 if anyone cares for a game or two). But there is no way on gods green earth that I'd do it for money.
Gaming should never be considered a career, when it is, it'll become boring and no longer be a fun activity. I really hope this never becomes a common job title.
No, I will not fix your computer.
~ Tech404
Unfortunatly, you have to be REALLY good at these games to make money. If you think you are really good, then you have to be even better.
I used to do Quake 3 WFA. So, I ended up hearing things about good Quake 3 players, which were, at the time, Fat1ity (or WTF ever you put that "1").
He apparently played lots of tennis and trained on the virtual field for long periods of time. The real-life sports, he said, helped him with coordination and prediction. So, you can just be a geek sitting on his haunches all day if you buy into Fata1ity's views.
What I'm getting at is: this isn't a bunch of part time gamers. This is a job, and, as with most jobs, once you get paid, the fun level drops. Kindof like when you decide to concieve a child and it isn't working as quick as you thought, the sex turns into a task instead of something fun to do (or so I hear from many people, as I've never tried to concieve).
to the point where anyone who's actually played the thing would say it's a generic description of all RTS titles. Yeah, they're writing for an audience of stockholders and CEOs, they think, but c'mon -- they could have differentiated it from every other title, couldn't they? (Especially because it's interesting that Starcraft is the center of this little cult despite being a rather old title?)
This is the conservative paper of record, at least for the George Will set, and anything I have any personal experience with they completely botch. I'll never forget the WSJ report, seemingly years after the fad, that men were starting to wear pony tails in office settings.
(But how about that etching of the video game star? Mostly it's just middle-aged businessmen gazing imperiously over their mahogany desks, but here we get a video game hero. Quite odd to see.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I was on my way to becomming a competative gamer in Counter-Strike. I joined CAL and was undefeated in CAL-O. Counter-Strike requires many hours of time of practice and strats for any person to be sucessful at it. I had to give up many things just to beat the first season I played and ultimatly I decided the sacrafices are not worth it. Friends become enemies, all spare time is used to hone your craft, and it turns from a fun game into a chore or job with extreme pressure. This is especially true in team based games like Counter-Strike. I made over $580.00 in one month on Star Wars Galaxies the first month I played. That was fun but became less fun over time. If you have the ability to sacrafice your friends, time, sanity, family, job, and in many cases education, then you too can be a pro gamer. Games are targeted at the younger generations. Many students sacrafice their time which would otherwise be spent on more productive activities but instead on games. To be a pro gamer you have to be all in 100%. I have seen my friends even take off a year after high school to get a job and play games instead of going to college.
who is sponsoring it, what do they hope to gain, and hoe long until the bubble burts and the realize there aren't any gains?
is it a spectator event? do they get money from people logging on in some spectator mode?
this is silly.
Sure, the TOP GAMERS make over 200k a year (BTW - being a pro gamer also means you need to buy bleeding edge technology, so that 200k isn't much after you subtract your monthly computer upgrade budget), but most hardly make any... not to mention that you not only have to be fabulous with one game, but with at least one new game ever year or so. If you take a break, or have an off year or two, you are in debt.
You do realize that these Korean players are playing StarCraft, game for which a machine from five years ago was overkill. I mean the game requires a Pentium 90, 16 MB of RAM, and a 2X CD-ROM! The game is five years old!
Even if you were member of some sort of mythical pro gaming league that adopted new games as soon as they came out, I can't seriously imagine spending more than $5000 a year on upgrading hardware and buying the latest games. On a $300,000/year budget, that's chump change. Hell, on that kind of budget you could buy a sports car or two each year without feeling the strain.
I'll stick to my day job, thanks.
Geez, I hope it has nothing to do with making purchasing decisions for your company if you think you have to throw a significant portion of a 6-figure salary at staying competitive in StarCraft.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Mr. Lim, who trains 10 hours a day
How on earth does he avoid repetitive stress injuries?
-Colin
i dunno about you, but 90% of the halfway (or more so) serious jobs i've ever had, have been ina field that i went into because i specifically enjoyed whatever it was. When i did stricly IT stuff, i liked networking and tech, and that's why i went into that arena. Much like the pro-gamer route you imagin, it started to become "work" and not "fun playing with computers."
I work handling video production for a music label now. Film/video was (and is) a serious passion of mine, and now i do that 5 days a week for a paycheck (And 7 days a week on my own time).. but it's still work. I'm sitting here keying BMP series exports of music videos.. somebody hold me back from the excitement!
I guess my point is.. work will always be work. If you're lucky, it can also, at times, be something fun that you originally got into because you loved it not for the money, but for some other (hopefully better) reason. The more successful you are in that field, hopefully the more shifted the balance of fun/challenge/innovation to "work" (i.e. a Sen. Net. Engineer has more liklihood to do challenging innovative stuff, vs a Lvl 1 tech support guy).. but there will always be that balance.
Alternately, I could make a good salary working 8-5 in an intellectually challenging field and save the gaming for its true purpose: a hobby.
does this mean you dont love your dayjob? that you dont have a great passion for what it is you do? im just thinking here:
lets say you spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year doing this. thats approximately 23% of your life your spending doing something just to make money. that may not seem like a lot at first but remember: this what youre devoting most of your time energy and thought to. and in reality the %age is probably higher -- with schooling, commute or extra hours etc. and of course sleep takes up 33% of most peoples life.
i just cant imagine consciously choosing to do something so intensely that i only kindof *like*.
-a
I hate to be the wet blanket, but think about it. If you make any kind of money at poker, you do so becasue you're consistantly winning against the other players well above average. And the law of averages says that you're probably winning somebody elses rent money.
Is gambling evil. No! But I think I'd prefer to play Blackjack against the house.
the house makes it money off of the previously mentioned gambling addicts. Thus you are again victimizing the poor wretches who can't controll themselves. And the air you breath, was once breathed in by hitler. I think you shoudl stop. and the water you drink? Problably at one time was part of a mass murder, stop drinking it. And the computer you use? it problably can kill a kitten, so I think you shoudl stop using it.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
at your chosen profession, less than 5 years ?. I tend to agree with the originator, often transforming an enjoyable hobby into a job sucks the enjoyable part out and it becomes work. I very much enjoy the hardware system design and testing I do, but it has seriously impacted the 'hacker' time I used to spend 'playing' with stuff at home. On the flip side I have access to some incredible hardware, my internal lan is fully fiber at 2GB speed running on emulex-9K cards to a 4 port fabric switch.
When I get to my rig at home I just want it to work, and I don't want to mess with it generally, which was the exact skill set that landed me the job in the first place....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The real pro gamers are going to be attracted to the games that have the biggest tournaments, and are therefore the most popular. Those are the games that last 4 years. Games like StarCraft, Counter-Strike, and the WarCraft series are all good examples.
Pro Gamers having absolutely nothing on Pro atheletes! You wanna talk about burning out on a game after playing it non-stop for a few years?
Ask Karl Malone if he's burnt out on playing basketball for more than 20 YEARS! Him and other athletes of his caliber have been playing professional sports 2-3-4-5 times longer than most of these platforms for gaming have even existed.