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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
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.
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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! ^_^
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
What I wanna know is how can i get someone to pay me to be their videogame coach. "Hit jump! Go that way!"
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 ?