I just wrote an article about fighting game Pro’s asking for handouts from fans in the community. What are your thoughts?
-Famine
Nice article.
I don’t see the problem imo. If people want to give you money for free that’s their decision, and you ain’t hurting anyone.
We have a saying from where I’m from. It goes: It’s not the asker who is stupid, but the one that gives.
There’s nothing wrong with people asking for money for free, there’s something wrong with people who DO give it away for free just because. At the very least, the pro player should give something in return.
I think whoever wants to support them should be allowed to, but them pressing the point for them to get support isn’t a good look. However, I can see why they do. The fact that they go around the country (and even world) and don’t get that much money or exposure from the tournaments they fight in is part of the reason why they play most of these tournaments at a loss. Even for big names like Justin Wong, Balrog and Filipino Champ, they get most of the money from their sponsor and not the tournaments, because the payouts are small since they are all mostly grassroots tournaments. The community doesn’t wish for them to support “eSports” which is basically the same as grassroots, except more money and different organizations with more sponsors (some sponsors that actually sponsor your grassroots tournaments). They would make more money from that, and would probably stop asking for donations (or handouts, as you bluntly put).
I’m just going to say, if you want to be the best and maintain the spirit of competition, you want the tournaments you compete in to have the best players from around the world. That’s probably why CEO and Canada Cup and those tournaments were pretty successful. People want to show they are the best in the world. It becomes a lot easier to do with more backing and support, not just from the community, but from the developers and big named organizations. All I’m saying is, if the community allowed itself to grow outside of just grassroots and worked with bigger tournaments, then there would be less handouts. Just my opinion, tho.
Things like Raffles and shit like that are up to the person. No one is putting a gun to the person’s head saying “put money to my stream”. The consumer spends on what the consumer wants. And if they think it’s worth their money, they’ll spend it.
I hear what you’re saying there, but it’s the point of looking out for the consumer (or fan) too. Just because people want to buy drugs on the corner doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have drug laws to protect them. Someone has to look out for the people who may not be thinking straight or have been taken advantage of from evil people. Sure, you can take the route of saying, “well it’s their stupidity.” But, at the end of the day, people are still getting screwed and maybe even leaving.
Now, I’m not saying that is what happened here, I’m just thinking big picture. Someone could take advantage of the situation, but no one will look after the fans.
I don’t see the relation in your analogy. Sorry.
Should professional basketball players not want to sell jerseys, signed products, and stuff like that? I think that would be a better analogy.
Maybe not the best analogy, but I was merely referring to advocating something being wrong enough where it’s illegal to help prevent others from doing it more. A better example would be mechanic shops taking advantage of customers who don’t know anything about cars. In the FGC case, professional gamers taking advantage of fans because they don’t know anything about the professional gamer themselves.
Bring back raffles
No, they shouldn’t. Why don’t you get a real job instead, fuckhead? Did you really think that playing video games was a valid career choice? Stop being in 2nd grade.
Your article is about Bala. Bala is one of the best players in the world, but he is NOT a true “professional” gamer. A professional gamer/poker player/dancer/baseball player is someone who makes enough money from that ccupation to live off from.
That’s not the case for Bala. You can’t call a teacher who plays poker as a hobby and makes less from poker than his teaching job a pro poker player.
I don’t see anything shameful with that Bala does. He’s not begging for people to pay his rent, just for a plane ticket to compete in the hobby he enjoys. If other KOF players want to help him, so Bala can entertain them with his play in return, that’s a fair deal.
I’m just surprised people aren’t ashamed to accept money for something so frivolous as a video game tournament. People who donate are suckers. I know for sure some of these dudes don’t need the money they are asking for.
The issue is that only a handful of top players actually do count as “professional” in the sense that they are making money from fighting games. For every Filipino Champ* who can just go to tournaments in Cali and make a living just from his winnings (not counting sponsorship money), you have hundreds of other players who may be good enough to make top 8, but aren’t able to support themselves.
*Even then, Ryan had to pay his dues and basically live of welfare so that he could play full time before he made it big.
Normally as a player you move on to more complex games once the current ones are too simple and boring for you, but in the world of eSports you see StarCraft 2 players switching to LoL because it’s where the bigger money is now.
And this is when your hobby really becomes a “job”, and I mean it in the bad way, because some people work in jobs they really like. So what happens when SF4 and Marvel are replaced with other titles that a sponsored player doesn’t like playing at all? What if the next game rewards other skills that he doesn’t have? Tough luck. Back to food stamps.
Maybe videogames are popular enough to financially support selected players, but part of the essence of the medium is that it’s constantly changing. Basketball isn’t going anywhere but you don’t know which videogames you’ll be playing 5 years from now, especially when you go by viewer trends. So even if videogames do become as popular as basketball, by default this business is chaotic and unreliable. The only people who can have some stability (assuming videogames do get as popular as basketball cuz right now they are far from it) is MLG and similar others, because they can provide the same exact service no matter which game gets popular.
I’m going with GomuGomu on this one.
It’s okay to ask, and if people want to give, then let them. But I can see how it can get annoying if the popular players keep asking for donations to travel. They really need to figure out another source of income because it bites them in the ass in the long run.
Don’t know why people are worrying about other people’s pockets lol.
Mind your own shit.
Hung out with Bala for a while last night, he seems like a cool dude, so let me say thank you to anyone who helped him get here.
Also you see to be cleverly plugging your own site with that link. I guess sneakishly might be more accurate.
ITT: people worried about people who takes good player to seriously.
Edit: had to edit the word “pro” out since it is retarded to call them that.
Reminds me of when someone offered FChamp $300 for his bag. Well off course Ryan (who thought he’d realistically only get $40-60 for it) sold the bag. Then again, this is how people make money off eBay.
Not really. There are plenty of people in eSports who are starving. The way both systems are setup is designed only for a handful of people to cash in regardless of how much cash they leave at the end of the night. eSports just has greater opportunities than say fighting games. Then there are certain games like LoL versus say StarCraft that have better payouts within that community with more opportunities than the other like it would be for PS4 versus Marvel.
Regardless, the system isn’t really design to give most players a chance to win their money back or greater like it for say fishing leagues. For example, in pro bass fishing, you can have a 100 bass fishing entry tournamnet where majority of those entrants could receive their money back. They have something like a 50% to 70% entry fee payback system designed to keep people in the sport. So, no matter if you don’t play top 8, you at least get something. However, that’s mostly due to the fact that big sponsors are funding the grand prizes where all the entry fees are just used to pay everyone back their entry fees for at least trying.
I don’t know how such a system would work for video games, but it would be nice to see if something like what other non-gaming related leagues have tried would possibly work for video games. Especially if you could have a high chance of winning at least your entry fee back or more on the lower end of ranking as opposed to top 3, top 8 or even top 16 if big enough.