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Turn Your FPS Skills Into Cash
Game|Life is posting about a new agreement between Valve and an outfit called Tournament.com that will allow for an official Counter-Strike/Half-Life 2 Multiplayer game competition service. It sounds a lot like online poker tournaments, where players ante into a pot and the winner walks away with the results. "Another option is a perpetual, ongoing game that players can drop into at any time. If you get killed, you lose $1. If you kill another player, you get $1. When your virtual 'wallet' is out of money, you're done playing. Until you add some more funds with a credit card or PayPal, that is. For now, Tournament.com is strictly small stakes. Entry fees for the example tournaments were $3.60 for each of six players, with an $18 pot split between first, second, and third place. Company representatives said they're considering high-roller tournaments, but want to make sure the service has been fully field-tested, and potential cheating methods blocked off, before big money starts getting thrown around." One of the findings of the SOE White Paper was that some people are perfectly happy making money off of their gaming hobby. How long before we see similar livelihoods via this service?
Let's give people financial incentive to create bigger, better, and less detectable aimbots with the purpose of scamming people.
This has the very real potential to ruin public servers.
Enter some paintball tourneys. You like playing an FPS? Paintball is the ultimate FPS thrill. They pay out lots of money and you can actually use it for REAL equipment that you keep from game to game. Not to mention actual, physical exercise. Good times. :)
Blerg.
yup, I used to work in an arcade. the "points" distributed by the redemption machines were worth approximately .5 cents (that's half a cent for those of you who work at Verizon). The machines were programmed to dispense an average of 2.5 cents for every quarter deposited and then the "prices" in the point currency were marked up 100% such that if you paid $10 (2000 points) the arcade was making another $5 on your "purchase".
This is why redemption machines are so prominent in what's left of the arcades. Some kid who can play Tekken for 5 hours on two quarters because he spends his off-time practicing at home doesn't make arcade operators much money. I suspect applying the redemption methodology to online gaming could be a big money winner for companies if they implement it right.
Collector's Edition
This concept has been tried many times before by various companies, e.g. mplayer.com back in 2000, UltimateArena.com in 2003, PaycheckArena.com just last year. It never worked and it never will, for the simple reason that FPS games are highly skill-dependent - the random factor is very low and the better player wins 95% of the time. Some people try it, but the below average players soon realise they don't have any chance to win money and quit, thus raising the average difficulty until noone is left. This as opposed to poker, where the outcome of any single tournament is highly random and anyone with half a clue can win sometimes, leaving everyone convinced that they too have a chance of winning.