Originally Posted by
Morelock
E-sports are insane, the big teams players are literally rock stars selling out packed stadiums. Unfortunately it is a toxic/predatory community for many... similar to bike racing - sure the real pro's make some money (and in e sports cases... real money) but the vast, vast majority of the (kids for the most part) "pros" are living 5-10+ people deep in some dude's condo that they've signed a contract with to give some crazy % of their "possible" winnings, living very unhealthy lifestyles with 12-16 hour days with very little breaks and as Carleton said...very high stress. Twitch / Streaming has helped, but still... it's not all "getting fat paid to play video games."
Yeah, there are even doping and match fixing scandals...so that's how you know it's a real sport now, hahaha. The players travel on athlete visas to events.
I'm sure what you say about the kids (young adults) being signed to really bad contracts is true. When real money is involved and the talent is young and inexperienced in business, the vultures come out (see: music industry, TV/film industry, modeling industry,)
The stress is unbelievable. It's a grinder of an industry at that level. The fun goes out of it at much lower levels before the first dollar is made. I used to play competitive TF2 in a league for a few seasons. As I got better and moved up to higher divisions it not only felt like work...it
was work. I was like, "Nah." I made more money in my day job that I ever would have there. I simply sandbagged in the penultimate division and played for fun. No team meetings. No video reviews. No team drama. Just show up for pregame scrims then an official match and have fun.
Originally Posted by
Morelock
(I actually lived in a house where me and 3 friends paid rent/food/gas running bots in Diablo2 and selling high end items in Everquest. The good old days...)
I dabbled in TF2 trading, but it wasn't my thing. To be able to pay real bills with it is nuts.