prize money for online video games.

G

gxman

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
My buddy at work showed me this last night. Its an online team game called Dota.
There are tons of games like this where kids and adults spend countless hours everyday playing. Internet gaming is a huge contributor to the demise of pool.

http://www.dota2.com/international/home/overview/

Heres the money prize list. My buddy showed me a live feed of probably 1000+ people in a theater room watching the game on a huge big screen.

1st - $1,428,986 USD
2nd - $628,754 USD
3rd - $285,797 USD
4th - $200,058 USD
5th - $114,319 USD
6th - $114,319 USD
7th - $42,870 USD
8th - $42,870 USD
 
gxman said:
My buddy at work showed me this last night. Its an online team game called Dota.
There are tons of games like this where kids and adults spend countless hours everyday playing. Internet gaming is a huge contributor to the demise of pool.

http://www.dota2.com/international/home/overview/

Heres the money prize list. My buddy showed me a live feed of probably 1000+ people in a theater room watching the game on a huge big screen.

1st - $1,428,986 USD
2nd - $628,754 USD
3rd - $285,797 USD
4th - $200,058 USD
5th - $114,319 USD
6th - $114,319 USD
7th - $42,870 USD
8th - $42,870 USD
Click to expand...



And yet, it requires supreme strategic thinking and rote memorization, a lot like pool.
 
As someone who has competed in these things (not dota but I was highly ranked in a few other video games at one point in life when I spent alot more time at the monitor and a lot less time at the pool hall) - those numbers are real but the level of competition is ridiculously high and pretty much all asian. (Although starcraft is really the big asian market, there are more american DOTA players than others).

The big money comes from the huge names they pull in for sponsors. One of my good friends works for MLG (Major league gaming..yea, it's a thing.) and I got to go behind the scenes when they were touring in Raleigh. Mountain Dew, Doritos, a number of PC hardware companies and manufacturers, etc...huge names throwing weight into the industry because the ROI is there. For companies like Mountain Dew / Doritos they offer incentives like in-game codes and special redemption stuff for buying their product, and the number of overweight kids spending 12 hours a day eating doritos and drinking mountain dew is abundant, so there's a huge market for it.

What you'll find is that outside of the top ~50 people playing those games, no one makes money from it except for the sponsors. It's a really, really good investment for them.
 
I guess its too easy to get carried away playing these games in the comfort of your home.
All the jazzy graphics probably has a lot to do with it too.

I've seen my older brother(around 40) and nephews spend their entire day playing these sorts of games.

Even with no money involved, people cant quit playing these games.

Personally, I cant spend 5 minutes playing it.
 
You have absolutely no way of knowing this is behind the "demise of pool"

That could only be true if pool were the only other option, but it's not.

By your logic, getting kids involved in team sports is the demise of pool.
 
gxman said:
My buddy at work showed me this last night. Its an online team game called Dota.
There are tons of games like this where kids and adults spend countless hours everyday playing. Internet gaming is a huge contributor to the demise of pool.

http://www.dota2.com/international/home/overview/

Heres the money prize list. My buddy showed me a live feed of probably 1000+ people in a theater room watching the game on a huge big screen.

1st - $1,428,986 USD
2nd - $628,754 USD
3rd - $285,797 USD
4th - $200,058 USD
5th - $114,319 USD
6th - $114,319 USD
7th - $42,870 USD
8th - $42,870 USD
Click to expand...

All other activities are contributors to the demise of pool. But none of them are more responsible than the billiard industry itself. The fact that we have no organized and sustained campaigns to get more people to PLAY pool, the FACT that the Billiard Congress of America has for 20 years consistently sold booth space to other activiites including ping pong, poker, shuffleboard, video games, virtual golf and the like has led to the demise of pool. Instead of going to those other shows and selling people on the idea of selling pool tables, building pool rooms, holding events the BCA has done all it can to sell pool room owners and retail store owners on the idea that the way to increase revenue is to offer activities other than pool.

Now, as to the video game prize money, the deal there is simple, MILLIONS of people paying in a small amount = millions in prize money.

Imagine if the APA took $1 per week from all their players for 32 weeks. They claim to have 250,000 players so that's 8 million that they could use to hold a grand event with a $1,5 million dollar first prize and then the rest distributed on down.

Gosh I wonder how many players would be signing up to play APA if they had such a tournament every year? Imagine if an APA 4 were to win it or an APA 3 were to cash in for $60k?

Hell let's imagine that they increased their membership so much that they had 500,000 players paying 3 nights a week and all paying a dollar a night. 1.5 Milllion into the grand tournament fund for 32 weeks. Well that would only be 48 Million dollars so we could have a tournament with $10,000,0000 as the first prize.

The APA 3 might cash for $500,000

But no, such things will NEVER happen in pool.
 
I'm an avid gamer. If you think those numbers you should look at the numbers for League of Legends. 30k people watching some kid play at his house via a stream. Multi million dollar prizes. 500k people watch tournaments of the top teams. It's all quite amazing.
 
Dota has probably 5-10 million players, and only a handful of them are doing it for the money.
People play it because it's fun, and a good social game.

Pool meets those requirements too, in theory, but there's something different
about team games. It's something pool has tried to tap into but ultimately pool is one guy
playing at a time whereas dota is 5 guys playing on the same side simultaneously.
True team play is possible rather than individuals taking turns assisting their teams.

Team play alone isn't necessary to make a game popular (golf) nor is good prize money
(pool is played by a ton of people even if the prize money sucks). But when you combine
those 2 things, you got a recipe for a very popular pastime.
 
Pool is full of dirt bags. I spent thousands of hours in a few different rooms and the reputation pool has is well earned. Not all pool players are dirt bags but if you hang out in a room long enough as a newbie someone at some point will take advantage of your interest in the game. I paid my way up and knew it was part of the process but most younger people wanting to learn the game do not have a favorable experience if they try to learn it in a pool hall. There are exceptions but the more often than not you have enough jackasses just looking to score a few bucks from some kid that can't run 3 balls. That same kid rarely learns to run 6 balls before he just decides it not worth being rolled repeatedly. Just my 2 cents... I did my fair share of gambling and paid plenty to learn the game, then I learned to gamble and when you learn to gamble it's no longer gambling, it's essentially stealing. This was 25 years ago, I still have the occasional wager at our club but it's a fair game. The last time I steamrolled someone was last year, but it was well deserved. I am afraid the game isn't dead but it is on life support. Not sure video games are the primary cause but they certainly contribute.
 
I'm still getting over the demise of Crazy 8's. Uno was the beginning of the end.

$1M payout isn't so bad.. should kinda be expected.. from an industry that generates billlllllions. I still remember the day I delivered a pizza to some guy that was busy making a game. Said it was going to be really cool, had elves, humans, orcs and things.. told me to watch for it when it came out, it was going to be called Warcraft.
 
ND Fan said:
younger people wanting to learn the game do not have a favorable experience if they try to learn it in a pool hall. There are exceptions but the more often than not you have enough jackasses just looking to score a few bucks from some kid that can't run 3 balls. That same kid rarely learns to run 6 balls before he just decides it not worth being rolled repeatedly
Click to expand...

None of this sounds right to me. Learning pool in a pool hall is how probably 95% of us did it,
and it's a great experience being out with friends, yelling and drinking and flirting
and listening to music.

I got 'hustled' exactly twice and neither one was a hustle, I just didn't know
the other guy's speed. When I lost a few bucks I decided gambling didn't do anything for me
and just told people no. Since then pool's been a great part of my life.
You make it sound like kids are getting repeatedly robbed with no say in the matter.
And they quit pool forever because they cannot gamble at it.
They might quit gambling forever but they will cheerfully keep playing pool with buddies.
 
What's amusing is that some kids stream their online video game play for free, have on average 2k viewers at any given moment, and get paid to do so by twitch.tv, justin.tv,ustream,etc. While I have paid to watch pro pool event streams where they didn't get over 1200 viewers all weekend with all of the top players being streamed.
 
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