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?

Comments

Great idea.

[Spazntwich]

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.

Re:Great idea.

[MeanMF]

Let's give people financial incentive to create bigger, better, and less detectable aimbots with the purpose of scamming people.

It doesn't seem like people need any incentive to do that now...Although yeah this will just make it 100x worse. This is a problem on the poker sites too - and only the really greedy and/or stupid ones get caught.

Better idea:

[zyl0x]

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. :)

Old concept

[Krommenaas]

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.

Great idea actually

[roskakori]

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.

On the contrary. All cheaters will go to money servers, ruining their day competing with other cheaters while us honest gamers can hang out on now cheater free public servers. We won't get rich, but we'll have a good time. Hooah!