To dream the impossible dream
(media.scored.co)
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remember kids, if doing the thing you enjoy doesn't earn you money or fame, your wasting your time!
Nah I'm good Matt Walsh. I'll enjoy my escapism. Thanks.
What's funny is this actually became real. There are/were pro League players, pro Starcraft players, pro Fortnite players, etc. Of course, you have to be able to actually win high-end tournaments, or at least bring a ton of viewers to your stream, but still. I wonder what Gary Larson thinks of the pro esports scene.
Those are also barely "careers" in the long term. You age out of them fast due to reaction times and dexterity needed and, unlike other professional sports with similar issues, you don't have the fame or millions to carry you through the rest of your life. And that's in perfect scenarios where the company behind the game doesn't ruin it (Hi Overwatch!) or you simply mastered a tactic that becomes obsolete or nerfed.
So the joke still works, because none of those guys are getting retirement benefits or a salary. They are just coasting off tournament wins and sponsers, which is a fickle life.
Twitch streamers can still make good money. That requires a certain amount of charisma or cleavage however.
You already said Charisma
And I'd wager 99.9% of them are also coasting on their current income with little plans for 5 years from now, let alone retirement, if they even can keep going that long.
That's for the handful who weren't gross autistic wierdos. Which is why they were capable of going pro to begin with but makes them worthless as a personality streamer.
All the money accrues with a tiny minority at the top, and 99% get nothing. That's true of both esports and streamers.
By all means, have fun with your life, but have a backup plan.
Largely true, but the 2019 Fortnite champ won $3M. The champion CoD team last year won $1M. If they wisely invest that kind of money, they can be well set up, or at least much more comfortable, for the rest of their lives. Now, they may not do this, but this is no different than any other pro athlete (who also may not be that famous; who cares about some random defensive back in Cleveland?).
That's a pretty big If, one that I'd wager most of them do not succeed at. Almost every "champ" you see is living in an epic gamer compound and has all sorts of awesome things that their money was spent on. And that's just for the champs, which means most people aren't making a fraction of that for their entire years work.
And while its equally true for regular athletes, those guys also are still peak physical specimens who are probably at least somewhat capable of being social. In stark contrast to most pro-gamers who are usually the epitome of nerd stereotypes about physical capabilities and social interactions. The handful who aren't usually quickly devolve to just basic Streamers instead.
Which the "youtuber/streamer" industry has much the same issues of longevity, but at least isn't hardgated by age.
Sure, but the opportunity is there.
While they're working out, yes. Tons of former athletes just become fat and out of shape, though.
Quite possibly, but not always. "Uhhhhhh, obviously they're a great team, uhhhhhhh, at the end of the day uhhhhhh we have to play harder to get the W" is not exactly peak charisma.
Also, this assumes they haven't been injured during their career -- which could reduce both their charisma and physical fitness. Family Guy did a funny bit about this.
Yeah it was probably around 2006 when I learned that there was a pro scene in the US (Halo). Prior to that I had always assumed it was primarily a Korea and Singapore thing (Starcraft).
It is like winning the lottery, just because %0.01 of people win the lottery does not mean you ever will, have a REAL plan for the future. Making a living gaming is not a real plan. Studying, creating a small business, applying for state jobs, those are real plans.
It's like anything else, how many people are actually world class at any competitive field to make it financially viable.
Probably isn't aware it exists
Yeah it's weird how playing games well actually became directly profitable.
But in indirect results, I still got more useful real life skills out of games than I did 80% + of school.
When was the last time I needed to recount the periodic table from memory? Never.
When this comic was first published (1990), it took a lot more effort to make computer games work, so there was a lot more overlap between gamers and people who knew how computers worked. The "Gamer to IT/CS pipeline" was real.
So it wasn't so much "Looking for Good Mario Player" as much as "Looking for someone who can modify a graphics card driver's INF file to recognize your unsupported graphics card so you can play this game" or "Looking for someone who can develop a keygen for this game".
From what little I've seen the modern "Gamer to IT/CS pipeline" seems to be filled with people developing server emulators for games which require an online server. Whether this is a harder or easier problem than the one my generation was faced with is hard to say.
There is still the gamer to QA pipeline, as hex debugging hasn't actually gone out of fashion. But it's nowhere near as prevalent as it was back in the 1990s, since that's how all "cheats" used to work for things like GameShark.
Server emulation is a whole other beast that requires a completely different skillset. It's not something that's as common to the average gamer today as modding was back in the day; seemed like every other Quake player new enough C# to make simple conversion mods, and it seemed like every other TEN session was running some custom Quake server mod, like Quake Cars or whatever.
So many people got their start modding games it isn't even funny.
No kidding, Pavonis Interactive who are working on Terra Invicta were known as Long War Studios previously because they made the Long War mods for the revamped X-Com games. It quite literally led from modding to actual game development.
Another one that immediately comes to mind is the guy behind Darthmod for several Total War games going on to Game Labs, and making the Ultimate General and Ultimate Admiral games.
I paid my college almost entirely off World of Warcraft. Both in game playing and also being a ghostwriter for "lore blogs" to slap their name on. And I didn't even set out to do so, I just played enough that I got good enough (and read enough) to be able to get paid for my performances.
Unfortunately Streaming and Twitch killed that entire market. No one wants to pay for a run from a random in a "top 25" guild when they could be ON STREAM with their favorite eceleb or WF guild.
Speaking of WoW, Blizz has literally hired players and put them in very important positions like with Ion.
Stellaris has done the same.
This comic is literal boomer tier ignorance but then everyone here knows this.
And them doing that with Ion is a perfect example of why you don't do that, homie is a blight upon the game and always has been. Showing that "playing the game" in no way qualifies you for actually designing one.
Heck, between "community moderators" and them letting WF guilds in on their patches WoW is almost the perfect example of why you should never expect people who "play the game a lot" to be any good at working on them.
Unfortunately for both those games the ones hired were basically done so through the Peter Principle, or whatever the name is.
Ion was hired for his raid knowledge, so of course got put in charge of non raid stuff. Same with Stellaris with the weasel they put in charge of that who outright lied about the AI getting buffs even after players were able to prove it.
That comic was published in 1990 and would have been 100% accurate at the time. If all you knew how to do was play Mario really well, there was no money to be made doing that.
The money came from someone realizing "hey Timmy seems to have a real knack for that computer thing; maybe there's some way he can do that for a living". That was the route I eventually went.
The other dream was getting a job writing reviews for a gaming mag and parlaying that into a job testing for one of the developers, but that was so rare you probably had better odds winning the lottery.
I suppose there was also the perennial demand for programming Texas Instruments graphing calculators which I may have done some for trade.
Later on (probably starting in earnest around the Quake and Half Life era) mods started to become a thing, but you had to have some decent programming chops to do that.
In the WoW era everyone wanted to work for Blizzard (a college friend who was one of the most talented people I know got an on-site interview), but few were chosen.
But if all you knew how to do was play games without any of that other computer stuff (and I had some friends for whom that applied) there was no money to be made doing that. I think a couple of them co-own a tabletop games store, but the rest all do something else
You’re saying people don’t buy boosts because they would rather watch Twitch?
I'm saying Streamers, even those barely pulling any viewers, stole all my customers. Having VODs and recordings of your play does wonders for your reputation and ability to pull over "dude trust me we're good, look at our achievements and gear."
It was a dying market for me anyway. I sold Challenge Mode runs, which only lasted for two expansions before being replaced with the absolute garbage that is M+.
😂 I bought challenge mode for the portals years ago when I played.
In current content they are some of the most useful things imaginable, and they still have good value for returning to the content to farm whatever you may need years later.
Its no wonder DF brought them back.
I guess this means all the guys who played sports, watch TV, fish, etc should stop what they are doing if they aren't able to make money off of it.
Yes, it's horrible to not monetize every facit of your life. /s
Dario Casali helped make the Doom 2 mod The Plutonia Experiment.
He got hired by Valve and made Half-Life.
50k was still something respectable, lol
It really captures just how old that comic is, which a lot of people in this thread seem to have missed in their rush to talk smack.
Man, just thinking about all the money my dad raked in by coming home, drinking beer, and watching NASCAR every fucking day.... /s
(seriously, I'll NEVER understand NASCAR or the appeal. It's just driving in a circle for literal hours)
I made a ton of money in my early teenage years as a result of what would have started out with games. Starts as an elementary school making maps, hacking games, things like drivers, memory management, other things you had to do in DOS. Am I really in IT now, no, but that's by choice. The learning that resulted from that gaming had me learning people skills and business as a 13 year old trying to sell websites and tech services and continued to the point it paid for my entire college education with not a cent of debt coming out of it.
I don't think it applies less now. Well, maybe somewhat as things are a bit easier. I never had consoles much, we had one at one point, but never really had the money for games. I did have access to computers because my Dad was in IT.