Become a Professional Gamer 338
A user 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'!"
Whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you think you can both enjoy and work at the same time? A lot of professional athletes out there still love what they do, and professional gaming.. well, I don't see the huge difference from that and a "regular" sport (apart from the obvious).
Don't quit your day job (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheaters (Score:2, Insightful)
Musician, Pro Athelete, Gamer (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
I'll stick to my day job, thanks.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
job (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Gaming fun (Score:3, Insightful)
Gaming should never be considered a career, when it is, it'll become boring and no longer be a fun activity. I really hope this never becomes a common job title.
Sad Facts (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
As usual the WSJ is well behind and lame (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Pro gamers are strange creatures (Score:5, Insightful)
where is the money from? (Score:3, Insightful)
is it a spectator event? do they get money from people logging on in some spectator mode?
this is silly.
Not good at math or reading comprehension, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
RSI? (Score:3, Insightful)
How on earth does he avoid repetitive stress injuries?
-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
Being challenged intellectually isnt a hobby? (Score:3, Insightful)
I work handling video production for a music label now. Film/video was (and is) a serious passion of mine, and now i do that 5 days a week for a paycheck (And 7 days a week on my own time).. but it's still work. I'm sitting here keying BMP series exports of music videos.. somebody hold me back from the excitement!
I guess my point is.. work will always be work. If you're lucky, it can also, at times, be something fun that you originally got into because you loved it not for the money, but for some other (hopefully better) reason. The more successful you are in that field, hopefully the more shifted the balance of fun/challenge/innovation to "work" (i.e. a Sen. Net. Engineer has more liklihood to do challenging innovative stuff, vs a Lvl 1 tech support guy).. but there will always be that balance.
Re:Whatever. (Score:3, Insightful)
I just don't think there is the fan or media interest to be able to support a large pro-gamer population. There probably is a small segment of the population willing to watch others playing video games, but I don't think you will ever sell out 20,000 seat arenas hundreds of time every year, or get millions of people to watch it weekly on TV. And without the fan interest (and advertising that follows it) pro-gaming can probably never expand because the prizes will have to either be put up by the sponsors or come from tournament entrance fees. And as you have said, that may be enough to support a handful of pro-gamers in the country, but not enough to make it huge.
Whatever? (Score:2, Insightful)
does this mean you dont love your dayjob? that you dont have a great passion for what it is you do? im just thinking here:
lets say you spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year doing this. thats approximately 23% of your life your spending doing something just to make money. that may not seem like a lot at first but remember: this what youre devoting most of your time energy and thought to. and in reality the %age is probably higher -- with schooling, commute or extra hours etc. and of course sleep takes up 33% of most peoples life.
i just cant imagine consciously choosing to do something so intensely that i only kindof *like*.
-a
Re:Whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it does have physical limits. Extreme hand eye cordination is required. Also, if you RTFA you would have seen that what makes the guy so good is the number of moves/minute that he has been known to do. Up to 6.66 moves/second. If that isn't a physical barrier for average people I don't know what is.
Re:Well, consider (Score:4, Insightful)
Is gambling evil. No! But I think I'd prefer to play Blackjack against the house.
the house makes it money off of the previously mentioned gambling addicts. Thus you are again victimizing the poor wretches who can't controll themselves. And the air you breath, was once breathed in by hitler. I think you shoudl stop. and the water you drink? Problably at one time was part of a mass murder, stop drinking it. And the computer you use? it problably can kill a kitten, so I think you shoudl stop using it.
You are very lucky, or maybe new (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
Re:Don't quit your day job (Score:2, Insightful)
But the original poster was writing of making a career of gaming of 20 or 30 plus years. I don't think antone here can claim that they know what the "big" game is going to be 15 or 20 years from now. I think the gaming industry is just too fluid for someone who is 18 years olds to be able to realistically say he can make a career by gaming.
15 years ago side scrollers were every where-and you may have been the best Super Mario or Metriod player, but what good is that going to do you now, no one makes side scollers anymore. If you want to make a career out of gaming then I think you have to accept at least the possibilty that a couple of times during your career you may have to learn an almost entirely new sets of skills and strategies, in addition to having to deal with slower reflexes.
Pro atheletes can make up for their slower reaction times because after years of playing they hopefully have a deeper understanding of their sport. A gamer who played FPS for his entire career could probably do the same thing, I just question whether it is reasonable to assume that a single genre is going to be viable for a 20+ year time frame.
Re:Whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whatever. (Score:3, Insightful)
now that i'm doing something else (programming computers, go figure) i've gotten into a few bands to play in recreationally and it's a blast. i've gotten to remember why it was i did all of that to begin with, plus (ironically enough) i can now afford the nice gear that i only wished i could have when i was actually doing it every day.
i think there's a lot to be said for enjoying your career, but there's certainly something to be said for keeping your "hobbies" (if you can call a lifelong obsession a hobby) separate. for me, the fact that i no longer need to care if i make money at a gig frees me to play whatever the hell i want rather than what "the masses" will want to consume. that sort of cushion makes it much easier to focus on music as expression (self-indulgence?) rather than as a commodity.
as an aside, music is certainly a great hobby for those of us who like free beer!
Re:There is a big difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is a big difference (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask Karl Malone if he's burnt out on playing basketball for more than 20 YEARS! Him and other athletes of his caliber have been playing professional sports 2-3-4-5 times longer than most of these platforms for gaming have even existed.