Fortnite: too much money in prizes?
Carlos 'Ocelote' Rodríguez comments in many interviews how he convinced his parents that he was serious about this esports. It was after winning 2000 euros in a tournament in Hannover (Germany), the most important prize he had won with 17 years, and a respectable figure for his parents to let him devote more time to competitive video games.
Source
Now let's imagine a parallel world where Ocelote would have taken three million dollars in his first competition. Would you have taken electronic sports in the same way? Would there be G2 as we know it? Or maybe he would have experienced an early retirement?
This hypothetical scenario is one that we ask ourselves from Movistar eSports, but the one that ignited the debate about the amount of some current awards was Jake 'Stewie2K' Yip, CS: GO player in Team Liquid. During a Twitch broadcast, Stewie2K was visibly irritated by reflecting on the Fortnite World Cup.
"He has a perfect weekend and earns more in two days than me in my entire career," he said in reference to Bugha, world champion in the battle royale of Epic Games. At 21, it cannot be said that Stewie has done poorly in esports: since 2015 she has won $ 970,000 in prizes, approximately half of them with the stellar performance her team has had this year. However reaching that figure has taken 133 tournaments against the three million that Bugha pocketed in a single weekend.
The dilemma of how large economic rewards affect the performance of electronic athletes is not new. The International (the most important Dota 2 tournament) has been beating its own record for years as an event that distributes more money in esports, and elite players don't seem to have lost the winning craving. Rather the opposite.
Except for the three best classifieds in the Fortnite World Cup, the first 41 positions of professionals with the greatest prizes for electronic sports belong to the MOBA de Valve, according to the specialized page Esports Earnings. You have to go down to Andreas 'Xyp9x' Hojsleth (sniper in the Astralis super-team) to find someone from CS: GO. The 23-year-old Danish accumulates one and a half million dollars in 140 tournaments, and the biggest prize he has won at once was $ 200,000.
Source
Unlike the economic rewards they earn per event, the individual fortunes of the players are more difficult to calculate, because factors that are not public in nature are on the scene. For example, Lee 'Faker' Sang Hyeok is ranked 60th in the Esports Earnings overall with 1.2 million in prizes, but his salary is estimated at 2 million annually, which would easily make him the richest player in the world.
When is a prize too high? Judging by the reaction he had in front of the camera, Stewie2K's reflection seems to come more from an eventual resentment than from complete disagreement. Electronic sports are, after all, a business, and the prizes are often linked to the capacity of the call they generate. In that Fortnite is the king right now: 250 million monthly users endorse it.
There are notable exceptions, such as games that seek promotion with rewards well above the expectations they raise. They are, however, a minority, and few titles that pull that strategy end up really triumphing. Shadowverse is the perfect example: it went from $ 3,000 in prize money to the winner of its first World Cup in 2017 to one million in the finals of the following year. And virtually no one outside of Japan knows what that game is about.
Proponents of more rational awards argue that distributing smaller amounts among a larger number of participants or events could help the sector. And those who think that giving succulent compensation says for their part that a good pile of zeros attracts the attention of more people. But, for us, the question should be: how does it affect the ambition of the players to become millionaires from good to first? Because a world where there are no Ocelots, Xyp9xs or Fakers would undoubtedly be a much more boring place.
See you later
Source