Professional Gamers...

[Method]

When i was 12/13, around 1998/99 kind of era, i played a game called Rainbow Six (everyone has pretty much heard of it). It was around the time that online gaming realy started to appear and take off hugely, we all played on 56k on MPlayer and GameSpy, aswell as MSN Gaming Zone - so you can figure out the kind of era from that.

Anyway, this game took over the life of 99% of people that played it because of the online gameplay, and people realy spent far too much time on it.

There was one guy in particular whose tag was "EKS-BBallDude", he appeared to spend a fair amount of time on the game, and built himself up as the best of the best. He was impossible to beat, and his clan was always rank 1 on any ladder.

Because of the amount of time he spent on it, and how good he was, he was dubbed as "Professional Gamer". We all meant this as a joke, as nothing could be so stupid as for someone to get paid to perform well on a computer game that means nothing to anyone outside of the online community itself. Right?

Wrong.

After browsing a Guitar Hero forum i check from time to time (mainly to figure out modifying techniques etc to bring custom songs into my game etc...), it appears that the joke i was having all those years ago - is actually now not only possible, but happening to lots of people all over the world!

RuneScape - There is one guy on there that gets paid for being on the game almost 24/7, the company that make runescape actually had to expand the original game to allow him to increase his level as he had hit the maximum possible. He now gets money from a number of sources to simply play the game.

Rainbow Six - It has transpired that although BBallDude wasnt infact a professional gamer, there were others towards the end that were! One guy inparticular was actually paid by an un-named company to bring new players to the game by training them up when they first arrived in the lobby! He got bonuses for keeping himself in the Rank 1 slot on VGN (ladder we used!)

Guitar Hero - The YouTube era has allowed players of Guitar Hero to actually earn a living by playing guitar hero! Companies are sponsering players and asking them to playtest new controllers, guitar sticks, and when the first custom songs came about for Guitar Hero 1, multiple people have been snapped up by Activision and Neversoft to actually make the note charts for the songs included!

So, is this the way the world is going? Are kids coming out of school going to be so good at computer games that they earn a living from playing them? It is allready possible, Chris4Life has allready earnt his parents huge amounts of money from simply posting up his video's on YouTube! He is something like 9/10 years old. Competitions are now held all over the world, where the winners take home prize money in 4 figure territory!
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[Itchy]

Erm this has been going on for a while, I remember Sega Magazine in the 90s around 91/92 had this fat bloke called colin 'curly' something or other he even showed up in a few adverts...

The Mid 90s had street fighter/ tekken tornaments, infact I still have a old very old copy of Mean Machines Street fighter 2 guide.

In the back they had a professional street fighter player and prize money was floated about in the region of 10-15K.

End of the 90s they had this guy called the Tetsujin from Japan who beat 100 players or something on virtual fighter 3 , he entered into competitions became famous got sponsorship etc.

https://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XeFx9WcWoyg&feature=PlayList&p=EE9AF34FA9D55F35&index=0

Such things happen with eating contests too Takeru_Kobayashi
was famous in Japan till Japanese children tried to copy him and died from overeating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeru_Kobayashi


On a lower scale in manchester there has always been arcade hussling much like pool/snooker hussling , ie a game of tekken tag or street fighter £10-£20 bet on who wins , a mate of mine skipped school , and lived off this for a couple years.

I used to be deadly with Nina Williams in Tekken 2 for about 1 season in the gap between college and university I think all in all my prize money was about £1900 (a season was about 3 months) , and nearly got beaten up for real several times. Jenny's arcade no longer allows this though. But I then thought whats the point of all this and got a proper job instead.




I think the issue is , its better than working for a living , ie Sajjaak the guy who travels on an R1 everywhere , porn stars , musicians. The notion of the 9-6 mentality doesn't appeal widely anymore as in the past people were happy to have survived WWII and were thus happy to put in 9-6 for years and years, while people who have grown in their shadows like myself and Bonny ricardo think crap I don't want to become like that and seek alternative careers.
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[daemonoid]

I always wanted to be a pro gamer, I won a few comps in the early nineties - biggest prize was a nes (oddly enough for doing well at a snes game).

I ended up making games in the end, worked for sony & argonaut (CV on my very poor looking website in sig) before realising that i was getting paid bugger all for 60hr+ weeks just because of the privilege of working in games. I wouldn't recommend a job in games to anyone. I also don't think professional gaming will ever be as mainstream as real life sport, but there is a living to be made for the best of the best through sponsorship and prize money - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal1ty (you can even buy fatality branded sound & graphics cards).
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[trevoriv]

As mentioned it's been going on for a while with fatal1ty one of he more famous names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_sports

I used to play with a clan known as Three Kings when I was younger, they were a pro clan and at one point had intel as their backers, paying for them to compete in tournaments etc.

Not sure what happened to them though.
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[JonB]

Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel has plenty of computer hardware components named after himself.
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[trevoriv]

His contract was with Abit though wasnt it? Abit just closed down.
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[TheDonUK]

Poeple used to take Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament pretty seriously back in the day, i was in a clan called SiN if i remember correctly they were quite good, and i wasent bad.

I really enjoyed clan gaming at its best on Battlefield 1942 though, got to live out the solider/pilot fantasies there, nothing better than being the ace pilot in your clan, getting a message over teamspeak that 2 panzer tanks are murdering all your mates at the southern checkpoint and they are about to loose, then you come swooping out of the sky and drop 2 bombs directly down the man-holes on the top of the tank, insta-kill then flying back to the enemy's airfield and strafing their pilots that are standing around waiting for aircraft respawn, then parachuting out of your Spitfire, letting it crash into a mountain, spawn-kill a couple more noobs before making a dash for the Messerschmit 109's and then proceding to maintain air superiority for the whole game...

Ok i grant you a blowjob and a nice fat joint is probably better, but at 12/14 wow that was it...

Then i "discovered bikes" and havent spent a single penny on computers or gaming since...
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[Kickstart]

Hi

I must admit I do think a "professional gamer" is a very strange thing (beyond those who get paid to playtest and debug new games). But then you could say the same about anyone being payed to play a sport (including football, snooker or motorsport).

Logically if someone is doing what they want to do then you can get away with paying them less because of that. Just like the situation daemonoid found himself in.

Will such professional gaming last? Not sure really. Suspect what will happen in the very long term is that more and more "games" (ie, including already well established games, and even things such as celebrity gardeners) will land up with professional players, resulting in an ever decreasing share of the pot of money, to the point that the returns go down to not brilliant levels (with loads of the professionals landing up making a meagre living teaching OAPs how to play).

All the best

Keith
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[Charlie]

Someone has managed to get the perfect pacman score, clicky

I think that is pretty impressive
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[jack_zxr400]

I used to play a game a few years ago called Knight Online..

You start off just playing it cos a friend told you about it, your not that interested and it looks pretty shit cos you dont understand anything, but after awhile you cant get off of it and your trying to gain levels and items etc.

It got to a point where people would pay for items, IGC (in game coins), and characters. And they would say it was 'free to play' but you couldnt logon at certain times because the servers were too full and the only way you could get online on those times was if you bought a premium which ranged from bronze, silver and gold. Each gave you other bonus's too.

I knew loads of guys in the clan I was in that used headsets to talk to eachother. There was this family from america and it was like they all played the game! It did get to a point were I felt I was too into it and just had to detach myself completly because you couldnt just play for fun anymore. When you logged on, you were on for hours upon hours at a time.

Funny thing is now I dont understand the game atall or its addictive pull :/
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[daemonoid]

[MinhDinh]

a friend of mine once lent me diablo. to date, it's the only game i have ever clocked. this was about 2000. in 2001 he was playing a on line game called graal, which i didn't play because i didn't have the net. a few months later he found a game called the legend of mir 2. i had the net by then and from there we played for ages. it had maybe 2000 players and until 2007 it still had 300 odd. unfortunately it is now closed down due to no players. you had to pay like 6 quid a month for it.
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Hit the G spot.

[Charlie]

I got quite into Halo for the PC, Counter Strike: Source, Command and Conquer: Generals (and zero hour) and GunZ.

I don't think I ever completed Halo, I only played for its online play, same goes for CnC, play games online is so much more entertaining than playing 'on your own.' And I did play them online a lot.
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[5v3d3b0]

Ever heard of the CPL? - Cyberathlete Professional League
Prize money for first place in Halo 3, Counter Strike and the likes is nuts. In the order of 100k split between the team.
And people on wow sell gold for real money too.
It's a massive industry so naturally there's money to be made in weird ways

[eddclarke]

My old bosses brother was England's first pro gamer
google Sujoy Roy
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[Fnatic]

My user name is a CS1.6 'pr0' team.

Also my avatar. I made it my username as I have their mousemat as I used to be a heavy CSS gamer.

[JonB]

[Seb]

[Kickstart]

[jack_zxr400]

Yea I bought DoD and CSS and only play CSS every now and again now but didnt know so many other people on here did/do too xD should all go on and play it
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[JonB]

No. Because CSS is awful. It was good at the time. People need to realise this.
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Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it?s worth.

[5v3d3b0]

CSS is shit. 1.6 all the way

[mistergixer]

A mate of mine used to get some quite good prize money back in the days of Tekken & Tekken2. He was a very good player, but i found playing against him to be the most boring thing on earth - basically, as soon as the round started he would launch into some ultra-combo which would kill me off without being able to do anything.
He could never understand why i found this a bit tedious and wanted to play a different game after half a dozen rounds.



I'm a big fan of online gaming (CoDWoW at the minute*), but have never yet been able to understand the appeal of 'clans' - it just seems a bit silly and a bit ghey to me. Sure, playing with your mates and having headsets etc is great fun, but i think 'clans' take it over the edge for me.

*My CoDWoW name is The_AIDS. I chose this name solely for the reason that when i killed another player it would show on their screen as 'You were killed by The_AIDS.'
Juvenile, i know.


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[Jaloopa]

I can't stand playing online. I'm a perennial n00b and constantly get pwn3d. I'm resigned to the fact that I'll be lucky to finish easy setting on single player.

I still enjoy playing though.
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[Charlie]

With online play it just takes practice. I remember my first game on CS:S I killed the majority of my team most of the time because I couldn't tell the difference, didn't know how to get weapons at the start and once I realised the team system struggled for ages trying to tell the difference between T and CT.
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Past: Honda x8rs, Honda City fly, Honda Hornet 250, Honda VFR750, Yamaha xt600e.
Current: Honda CBR929RR & Yamaha XT660Z Tenere