They say that if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. They also say that, if a thing exists, humans will find a way to compete over it - or make money from it. So it was only a matter of time before the spiritual successors of pinball wizards and Prime Boosts pool hall warriors found a way to take video games from the couch to the colosseum. That's right. It is now possible to make a living playing video games. Someone was bound to clamp a vampire clip onto that money stream eventually. That's not to say that the journey hasn't seen its share of false starts and detours: Video game tourneys date back to the early 1970s, and attempts to turn them into watchable theater began as far back as the early 1980s. Today, pro-gaming tournament circuits ring the globe, and prize pools - funded by tournament hosts, game companies and sales of special passes and merchandise - reach into the millions.
Major events fill stadiums like San Jose's SAP Center, and online viewership can reach into six figures. Solid estimates on details - such as the lifestyle, money involved and the number of players making a living at eSports - remain elusive. It's a young sport and strictly a freelance operation. Winners pay for rent, rigs, and Red Bull with prize money and social media revenue, sponsorships and appearances. Wannabes often rely on parental support while they struggle to break into the top-tier leaderboards, Prime Boosts Supplement where teams and tournaments might take notice. But they're still part of a larger community, one that helps to account for eSports' rising success. When it comes to the level of access that fans have to pros and superstars alike, eSports is in a class by itself. Through social video services like Twitch, fans can experience the equivalent of listening to Tom Brady narrate his thoughts as he calls an audible, or follow Kobe Bryant on a fast break as he reads the defense.
Pay for the right access level, and a pro might even answer your question, or drop into a pickup game that a few lucky fans can join. To outsiders, professional gaming might still draw sneers. But to a global community that numbers into the millions, the joke is on anyone who doesn't follow these computerized contests of skill. Colosseum crowds - and the sponsors and cash that flow from them - remained elusive in the pro gaming's early days. At first, technical problems, including a lack of network code or infrastructure needed to link games fairly and effectively, posed the greatest single hurdle. But as the dance of client and server fell into step, and as the internet spread across an ever-growing galaxy of devices, Prime Boosts Supplement the major barrier shifted from a practical question to a matter of product awareness and access. Players facing off against one another wasn't enough to make a sport.
For a pastime to achieve that kind of status, people must play it, understand it and absorb its very essence into their twitchy finger bones. To make for good viewing, older video games needed to achieve such widespread adoption and familiarity as to pose no barrier to entry. Viewers needed to grasp the fast-paced action almost intuitively, and the "casters" who provided play-by-play and color commentary needed something interesting and informative to say. Against such a track record, newer games needed to compete by offering cleaner play, better visuals, novelty and something even more important: accessibility. In short, they needed the video game equivalent of stickball. While some games still charge up-front purchase prices, many of these younger tournament games glommed onto the free-to-play (FTP) model as a means of expanding their reach. Instead of a $40 to $70 price tag up front, these games make money via heaps of small transactions, chump change that pays for perks like power-ups, alternative visuals or expanded content.
With the advent of FTP games designed specifically to pit teams of players against one another, and with built-in ladder and leaderboard standings, games like "Dota 2" ("Defense of the Ancients") were tailor-made for eSports. As pro gaming has expanded into a global phenomenon, it has encountered another major hurdle: How to recruit teammates from foreign countries. Other sports already enjoy a special immigration status that allows foreign players to join U.S. As of May 29, 2013 - when player Danny Le's P-1 work visa application was approved, enabling him to join his teammates in Riverside, California - so do eSports teams. That's right: The U.S. Sports players as athletes, so maybe the rest of us can cut them a little slack. In case you're still not convinced, though, let's look at what makes these games proper sports. Through Twitch channels, fans can watch everything from tournament games to pick-up-games, all while getting in some face time with the channel's owner.