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
Screw that BS... Get a new team or something.
Out of almost half a million people, there has to be some remotely hot girl that this guy could get and not be afraid of rejection with.
I mean..... wait for it..... she' in YOUR FAN CLUB!
Hmmm.
So now you can claim your time gaming as 'job skills training'!
... really!..."
That should fly as well with the wife as the, "I'm working
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
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
"It's work, not fun," says Mr. Lim, who trains 10 hours a day with his eight teammates and their coach in a two-bedroom apartment.."
Hmmm.
[pro StarCraft gamer] Lim Yo-Hwan made about $300,000 from player fees and commercials.
And you thought you got pissed when someone Zerg Rushed you.
in South Korea, where, even more so than the U.S., there are increasingly highly paid professional teams competing in games
Jesus, are they outsourcing everything now?!?
My company has been paying me to be a professional solitaire and spider solitaire player for years.
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
Man... there was a Far Side comic about parents hopefully imagining newspaper classifieds desperately searching for a super-mario player so that their son, engulfed in games, would have a career.
Professional starcraft player. Fastest Zerg rush of the east! ^_^
CS Player Ola "elemeNt" Moum's sale (or buying out of his contract) from Schroet Kommando (SK) to NoA.
More info: SK's site, NoA's site and CSNation.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
Online Texas Hold 'em is the ONLY way to become a professional gamer.
Why doesn't the Slashdot crowd consider this to be "gaming"? It has all the elements of a great game AND you win money. Isn't that what this article is all about?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
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
But I ALWAYS destroy that Silly Chinese army in C&C:Generals. And if their Army is any indication of their gameplay, I'm home free!
Hmmm.
The fans of a given game can't reasonably be called hardcore until some of them die playing it (as with Diablo 2 a couple years ago). I see the Starcraft guys still lack commitment.
I long for combat!
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).
And if a career as a professional gamer doesn't work out ... you can always fall back on a career in professional sports.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I know pro-sports players buy massive insurance... but exclusively for fingers?!?!
Hell, can I get a pro-rated discount for only insuring my thumb, index, and middle finger? What about only the dominant hand?
Reminds me of the Conan O'Brian skit: "In the year twoooo-thousand... People will be able to save $150 or more on their finger insurance by switching to Geico!
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
I dunno. While it'd be great to get paid for gaming, playing one game 10 hours a day, every day, would get rather monotonous and dull after a while. I enjoy gaming because I can play whatever game I want for however long I want. I might play some UT2K4 in three game modes, or Viewtiful Joe, or NWN, or whatever suits my fancy. Any one game after a while gets to be rather boring. My initial UT2K4 craze (ie, spending every spare moment on it) lasted about 2 weeks - now, I play maybe 2 hours a week. I mix it up with Legendary Halo when I don't feel like competing online, or maybe Soul Calibur when my roommate's in the mood for an ass-kicking. I'm a gamer, no doubt - I've sunk hundreds into building a capable gaming machine, and the living room is jammed with consoles - but any one pursuit, especilly forced, would just get dull. Gaming is a hobby, a release, and to have to "train" for it would be rather unenjoyable, I think.
Of course, I'm very much not a powergamer, and I have an actual 9-5 that I work and come home to relax from, so my perspective is probably quite different from the younger crowd's.
Of course, this might be an interesting direction for games to go in. Unreal Tournament 2004 isn't too exciting to watch unless you're actually playing in it, so what types of games would do well on tv?
Another area that I find fascinating is the potential for people to do "useful" things in games. Could gamers solve potentially large problems by the fractal differential of the quantum encoding of their movements in a game of Doom? Will games move so far into the realm of virtual lives that people physically do work there?
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").
In the article, the author noted that the top player(s) can reach upwards of 400 APM.
This needs clarification about exactly what's going on here.
First off, this number is derived out of all the combined actions over the course of the game and divided by how many minutes the game was. There is a simple program created and written for this that analyzes each game through the replay details. If _anyone_ here plays StarCraft or it's younger brother WarCraft 3 (as both are considered professional games in Korea with WC3 becoming more and more popular) then you will know it's damn near impossible to accomplish anything efficiently with that high of an APM in the early game for about the first 2-4 minutes. To get that APM, keep in mind, he has to be clicking away approx. 6 times a second for the WHOLE match.
Yes, players can do this, but we gamers give it a special name: Spam clicking. As an avid gamer, spam clicking is one of the most obnoxious ways to show off your 1337 skills.
How do I know that 400 APM isn't possible, or at least where every click actually does something? Very simple, I've seen these replays, and by comparing top replays of players who spam click vs. those who don't, the highest _most efficient_ number is more are 150-175 APM, well below the 400 number the author glorified these players with. As you can probably tell, this works with marketers and advertising business, because I once tried to spam that much myself, and couldn't get higher than 250. People think it's supernatural.
Ummm... being a professional anything would require a level of responsability and dedication that for some reason I have a feeling you lack. Like professional sports, to make a living at this you have to be the best or at least in the top single-digit percentile. And there are always hundreds or more likely thousand of people busting their behinds to become better than you.
If you don't have the willpower or sense of purpose to put the game controller down long enough to get a passing grade at school, you might want to look into a career where being mediocre will at least put food on your table. My guess is that once StarCraft became a responsability, you'd find yourself sneaking a few rounds of some other game when you should be 'training'.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy -Cat Stevens
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Hmmm.
Mr. Lim, who trains 10 hours a day
How on earth does he avoid repetitive stress injuries?
-Colin
~sean
Stupendous Badass
the starcraft league has become my usual pastime just like I enjoyed MLB when I was in US. It's very exciting and interesting to watch the games on TV. I see new tactics everyweek. Beating opponents using the tactic over battle net is a joy. Seeing my tactic used by another players makes me excited and more addicted to the game.( I created Raiders tactic in WC3 ;-) ).
These days, Gillette is sponsoring a league and their ad tactic is simply amazing such as one official map for the league is named "Gillette XXX".
Surely there is a very creative cooperation between game developers, pro gamers, CATV companies, and league sponsors behind the success of this somewhat experimental e-sports. Especially when it comes to "Ad in a game", I see a lot of chances through these leagues.
Your ego is Matrix!
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.
People can gamble for fun without being addicted. If it was their rent money, they'd have hocked the computer first. There are a lot of people on there to just have fun who don't care if they lose, and basically play till it's gone. You take their money.
I don't know what this law of averages is, or what exactly is being averaged here, but I'd like to see some facts first.
Is gambling evil. No! But I think I'd prefer to play Blackjack against the house.
If you prefer losing to winning, by all means do.
He stopped playing basketball to make sure he didn't damage his hands. Isn't he still risking hand injuries with that sort of rule?
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 ?
that he is the Beast? Is it Armageddon already and nobody told me?
1- Rush
pro: Catch enemies off gaurd
con: over commits early, if rush fails your screwed.
2- Tech
pro: Mid game or late game you will have a huge advantage of one kind or another.
con: if they rush you in trouble, if they knwo what your doing you may lose the advantage.
3- mass units
pr0: works against newbies
con: won't work well against anyone else
4- Balanced force
pro: hard to catch you off gaurd, you ready for almost anything, strong through out.
con: Not as strong early as rush, not as strong late as teching, vulnerabel to devious tricks.
5-oddball strategies
pro: the funniest games when it works
con: you look stupid if it doesn't
6-Tower
pro: done effectivly, it can cripple your opponent
con: a vast commitment of resources early and it's statics so you can't re-use this resource later.
These are some general ways to win at starcraft.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Why not do it like poker tournaments? Everybody puts up a certain amount to play, and the top n players split the money according to some percentage schedule. A common format in poker is first-place gets half the total take, second-place gets half of that, third gets halved again, and after that it drops off more gradually.
Then you hold a bunch of different tournaments, with different entry fees. If you're poor, just start at a cheap tournament, if you're good you'll quickly earn the cash to go for the big money. After a while it's mostly top players at the big-money tournaments, but if some loser rich guy wants to put up the cash to give it a shot, he's welcome to...that's just more money for the winning players.
No b.s. about sponsorship deals, no weird rules to avoid offending your sponsors, just raw competition for money. Though of course you might end up losing money.
The only drawback compared to poker is that in poker, the luck factor makes it possible for a less-skilled player to do well. He might lose over the long term, and he needs to have a certain level of skill to have any shot at all, but he has a chance to go the distance without actually being a world-class player. In a game without the luck factor, it might be difficult to get enough players to generate the really huge prizes you can get in poker. Maybe worth a try, though.
The big difference between pro gaming and professional sports is that because professional sports are physical, you can only practice for so many hours before it becomes counter-productive (or impossible) to continue. In competitive gaming, to be competitive you have to spend a TON of time playing. Since it isn't physical you can spend every waking hour practicing. This is why a lot of pro gamers burn out after a while, because playing the same game every waking hour for 4 years gets old fast.
I wonder what it is about Korean culture that lends itself so well to social videogame obsession. My wife is Korean and she had an addiction to Tribes that seriously interfered with her real life. She eventually had to quit gaming completely.
I remember some story about a Korean guy playing until he actually died (of dehydration or malnutrition or something). And although data is not the plural of anecdote as they say, there seems to me to be evidence that gaming as a culture is sweeping Korea faster than almost anywhere else. When I visited there two years ago you couldn't walk 20 yards in Seoul without passing a PC Bahng (internet cafe/gaming room). People were there 24/7.
I've talked about it with my wife but she doesn't have a particular theory. Though she grew up there she's not very traditional so she doesn't seem to have any insight to it beyond her own obsession.
Any Koreans out there who have thoughts on this?
Cheers.
Then you're not doing it correctly.
Not Zork. XYZZY is the magic word from Adventure.
I was playing "adventure" on various DEC systems along time ago. This is so old that it was only "finally" ported into C in 1976!
Props where they're due:
Colossal Cave by Will Crowther, extended by Don Woods and ported to C by Jim Gillogly.
I just love people who think they are going to win a lot on online video poker against other players. You know who you are playing at those hold-em tables? 3-4 people who know eachother and are on the phone waiting for a sucker like you to come into their room. I know, I participated in a group like that once. You are playing against 2-4 people at what you think is an "open" table. In reality, they all bid up and then fold to the best of their four hands. Video poker is a fool's paradise. If you want to gamble for a living, make sure you can see the people you are gambling against, cause the online games are where marks get fleeced dude.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
I really think that with the arising cinematic gaming experience, a broadcast of a video game match could be every bit as compelling to watch as any action movie; perhaps moreso...in fact, I'm pretty sure moreso.
And I don't mean broadcast in stickly the television sense. John Carmack has theorized that eventually there will be "THE graphics engine". A standard engine which can be just as integrated into operating systems as any GUI server is today.
Couple that with more robust human interface devices and you could browse to a full-scale war; resplendent with all the physics and sights one would expect from the real world (and quite a few extras I'm sure). In a world of gigabit connections and clockless CPUs it's not hard to imagine a Game world so immense and immersive that people would spend thier lives in it; and just as our world, there will be celebrities.
However, as opposed to our celebrities, these virtual stars will have to fufill a noteably different set of criteria then our current rock, movie and sports stars. In many ways, I think they will have to have something of all of these.
But not only will these celebrities make thier livings online, but I foresee a plethora of people simply working full time jobs inside these worlds. Some of these workers will be like amusement park employees (perhaps making sure the AI behaves within parameters; like the guy that makes sure the automatonic pirates keep singing "yo ho"), others will make money the same way current workers inside MMORPGs do - via sales of virtually-gained commodities.
With a photo-realistic graphics engine, bandwidth galore and CPU to burn what can't you see in the virtual world that you can in ours?
While I don't necessarily disagree, I have to wonder how people would react if you said "football" or "basketball" instead of gaming. I don't see how, given a suitably strategic and interesting video game, professional gamers would be any different than professional athletes who get paid grotesque sums of money to engage in what is, for most people, a "hobby."
People don't get paid for how well or how hard they work, but for how much other people value their services. It now so happens that a very large number of people very much like to see top athletes perform, hence the gotesques sums of money.
Not that many people are very interested in seing others playing video games. Perhaps not very surprising, considering that the games were never made with spectacors in mind. Who knows about the future though?
Tor