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US Companies Sponsor Pro Gamers
Baddox writes "Professional gaming, which has for some time now been a popular venture in Asia, is finally starting to get some attention from big US companies. Teams for competitive shooters like Counter Strike are getting sponsored by large corporations like Johnson and Johnson. The article poses the question, "Is 'frags per round' going to be the batting average of the 21st century?" "
Is 'frags per round' going to be the batting average of the 21st century?
No. Our generation might be geeks but I think, for myself at least, the beauty of online gaming is not quantity but quality. That is pretty much the same for football for me too... it's the big plays that matter and make a game worth watching. It's awesome to watch a game where some professional gamer goes on a crazy rampage, doing all kinds of freaky/impossible moves and stuff, and that is the main draw to those events (as well as the celebrity factor), not the stats. With baseball, stats have to be the draw because the game is very slow.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I'm not trying to troll here, but this sort of thing has been going on for years. Intel and other big names have been sponsoring top clans and individual gamers for a while now. A lot of people have small computer businesses in their towns sponsoring their clans and stuff too. It's very common for internet cafe's to sponsor teams as well. I'm not sure why this is being reported as a "new thing" because it's most definately not.
So now we'll see Unreal skins with "BUDWEISER" and "MARLBORO" all over them.
And just think of the TV commercials. "Red Bull, the official drink of the 2006 Counterstrike World Championship". Or "KY Brand Lubricant - The official masturbatory lubricant of the 2006 Counterstrike World Championship".
The world of Slashdot readers is populated with a high percentage of people who are actually interested in a professional gamer's KTD. The rest of the world is not.
And it's not just because the rest of the world is still populated primarily by the sort of middle aged and old folks who still don't understand computers. Go to any high school, any college campus in the modern world and most of the students care about rugby, or football, or what have you. They will grow old continuing to care about such things, and it will not be a generational change. This will always be fringe.
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They are testing a new pill that treats epileptic seizures.
They are hoping that enough people start watching the games they sponsor so they are start going into convulsions, then BOOYAH! J&J to the rescue!
Profit!
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The word sponsorship itself can mean an array of different things.
Right now, pro gamers only get sponsored for things like travel, clothes, computer parts, food, etc. They may even get a salary, but this salary more often than not is not enough to live on.
This of course is much better that nothing, but still, computer gaming has a ways to go before it catches up to "real" sports in terms of sponsorship money and recognition.
Simply from the fact that our society praises the biggest, strongest, and most beautiful. Just because bowling is popular doesn't mean we recognise the best. I think gaming will be the same where it will have a following but never such fame as football, baseball, basketball, or hockey. I highly doubt computer gaming will ever have a Brett Favre, Michael Jordon, and Barry Bonds that commentators talk about 24/7.
Here's my theory as to why the idea of "pro gamers" will never catch on. In today's society, sports stars are pretty much celebrities. Technical skill helps, sure, but nowadays the average joe watches sports usually because of either team/city loyalty (sports have a leg up of about a century in this respect) or they enjoy watching a certain athlete perform. One of the biggest reasons that people are drawn to elite athletes are their ability to perform at a level that is pretty much untouchable. No one sitting at home ever seriously thinks they could have gotten a couple more yards than Vick did on a scramble, for instance. This is really not the case with "pro-gaming." Being a semi-competitive CS player for a couple of years, you really get the sense that if you were still in high school or did not have a fruitful real life job (as is the case with the vast majority of "pro gamers") and could afford to spend 8+ hours in front of a monitor playing games you could do just as well as the "elite" players. Having seen players rise to the absolute cream of the crop of gaming in a matter of months justifies this. Another thing is the personality, maturity, and charisma these "pro gamers" exhibit, which is pretty much none. Real sports are a great way to build social skills at an early age, and most elite athletes have a personality (for better or worse) that is at least interesting, can make conversation and feed the media, are athletically fit, and in general project an image that is marketable, above all else. The environment of the pro-gamer seems to work against all of these qualities. All in all, sports succeed because they are marketable, and they are marketable because people can either relate to or are impressed by them. I think any sort of professional gaming has severe defecits in these areas and will not be seeing any sort of mainstream penetrance anytime soon.