JAKE LYON AUGUST 2023
While the esports industry is being tossed on the rough seas of economic forces that are many orders of magnitude larger than the industry itself, it’s an important time to consider not only the corporate ships on that sea but also the brave group who dedicate some of the most important years of their lives to swimming in its uncertain waters.
Gamers are not only the lifeblood of esports fandom and the reason for its viability as a burgeoning entertainment industry; they are also the group from which its superstars emerge.
For many young and talented gamers, becoming a professional esports player is the dream. It was for me. As in traditional sports, the dream of being the very best is straightforwardly appealing to those who love to play and compete. It is especially so to young, passionate gamers seeking clarity of purpose in their lives and an alternative to the miasma of simultaneous insecurity and monotony of traditional career paths. The practical reality for a player embarking on this journey is, however, fraught with obstacles and uncertainty.
As much as I would love to present a hopeful message to aspiring young players, I think it’s important to be realistic about the odds of achieving the level of competitive success necessary to earn a living wage in esports. This is the most important threshold aspiring players need to be thinking about. Reaching the elite competitive level in an esport typically demands an enormous and continuous time investment–often impossible for those who need to earn an income to support themselves. This depends almost entirely on family circumstances. A player who can expect to be supported through college has much more time to reach the living-wage threshold in their game of choice than one who will need to earn an income much earlier. Although it is not impossible to continue to compete while working to support oneself, it is drastically more difficult.
Some manage to buy themselves more time or find independent success via careers in content creation that allow them to make a living without compromising their practice schedule, but these folks are the exception rather than the rule. Many elite competitive players are simply not suited to be successful entertainers and achieving financial stability as a content creator can be just as difficult as doing so in esports.
To contextualize the difficulty of what an aspiring esports player is trying to accomplish, let us take men’s football (soccer) as a comparative example. A 2019 FIFA report on men’s professional football found that there were 128,983 professional players out of an estimated 275 million players active in the sport globally. League of Legends has around a thousand professional players globally out of an estimated 153 million players active in the last 30 days. While the conclusions one can draw from this mode of analysis are limited, back-of-the-napkin math tells us that becoming a professional League of Legends player is 71 times less likely than the already herculean task of becoming a professional footballer.
Given the incredible odds stacked against a given player’s success, young people who dream of becoming esports superstars would be wise to consider the sacrifices necessary to attempt to become a professional player. Only a player whose natural passion for the activity has already placed their skill on the right tail of the bell curve should even consider it possible. Luckily, modern esports titles contain a feature perfectly suited to this evaluation.
The ultimate metric for evaluating one’s chances at a career as an esports player is nearly as old as videogames themselves: the leaderboard. One of the great departures that modern esport games make from most other competitive activities is in the ubiquity of online ranked ladders. Imagine a system where 1 million basketball courts exist side-by-side and players are continuously matched against one another in constantly changing teams. A new player starts at the bottom court; a player on the winning team moves to the next court and a player on the losing team moves back a court. The best living player can wind up losing in a small sample of games, but over time their skill will prevail and they will reach the rank 1 court. Such a system cannot exist for traditional stick and ball sports, but they’re the norm for esports.
No matter who you are and what background you might have, public online ranking systems are a great equalizer. Any esports player’s resume is glaringly incomplete without a mention of their achievements in this space. It is the first and most crucial competition in which a player must succeed in order to have a real shot at a competitive career.
What makes these ranked ladders unique in a competitive context is that they erase any formal divisions between different groups of players. The only thing separating a casual player from a full-time, salaried professional in this particular arena is winning games on the ranked ladder. Win much more often than you lose and it is a mathematical certainty that you will face the best of the best in time. These public leaderboards allow talented young up-and-comers to square off against legends, albeit virtually. Typically this functions as a prerequisite to the possibility of joining the pros on teams or challenging them on a competition stage. While a player who reaches the top of a game’s ranked leaderboard isn’t guaranteed to find the same success in elite competition, they will certainly have the attention of professional teams and a good chance at starting a career.
There is a larger, implicit decision continuously at play during this phase of a player’s career (whether the player is aware of it or not): in which game should they invest their time, energy, and talent?
Depending on the competitive format of the game (rules typically set by the game’s publisher) there may be age restrictions on professional competition. For example, the Overwatch League currently sets the minimum age requirement at 17. A player with a few years to wait before the possibility of joining an Overwatch League team could and should take seriously the possibility of trying to play professionally in a title that will allow them to profit from their skills without delay; a player must also consider the life cycle of a game and whether the game’s prime will overlap with their own. In traditional sports, a young and talented athlete possesses skills that are often highly transferable to similar competitive endeavors. The same can be true in esports. This transferability, though, is highly dependent on the specifics of a player’s experience, gaming strengths, and willingness to endure a relative reset on their competitive progression.
Players must evaluate for themselves which game presents the best odds for competitive success based on their experience, time horizons, and perhaps most crucially: which game seems most likely to endure as a professionalized esport. This is ultimately an exercise in calculated risk taking. Up and coming esports titles promise a level playing field and a chance at a relatively fresh start, yet their success and the future scale of professional competition is unknowable. Enduring and well known esports offer a measure of relative security, but a new player in an old game finds themselves with years of catching up to do as they work their way up the ranks.
Publishers seeking to fit their games into the landscape of esports do well to cultivate a reputation of nurturing their nascent competitive scenes if they want to attract elite talent. Riot is clearly a leader here, as any new title they release has the implicit backing of a publisher that has integrated esports into its DNA.
In my personal journey, I knew even before the release of Overwatch that it would be my best bet at having an esports career. Blizzard’s support of Heroes of the Storm esports despite its relatively minor market share in the MOBA category was for me reliable evidence that Overwatch–by all appearances set to be much more successful in its niche–would be a worthy game in which to take my best shot at a professional career.
These decisions about which game to focus on are for players as crucial as they are rare. Aspiring players will only have the time for at most a few attempts at professional success, and reaching the top in a popular title can take years of total dedication to its mastery. It is perhaps the most tragic outcome for a player to succeed in reaching the top echelon of competition only to find that their skills can no longer command a living wage.
Even players who are able to realize the dream of earning a salary to compete professionally have only taken the first step on the path to true security. A rookie player without competition for their contract will likely only be earning the minimum salary allowable under the rules set by the competition in which they compete. For competitions not governed by any contractual standardization, some players choose to sign highly exploitative contracts for fear that it is their only chance to ‘make it’ as a professional gamer. Many of these players are completely uneducated on the nature of contract law or simply fail to consider how much they risk in signing something that they have not read or understood. The dream of esports stardom can be a powerful intoxicant for many people in this position. As an aside to any player who happens to read this, please at least read any contract you intend to sign and try to be sure that you understand what the contract truly commits you to. I’d also highly recommend having a lawyer look it over before you sign.