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Being in university at the moment and having a tight budget each month, I am astonished to see how much money is thrown around at starcraft 2.
Coaching:
People pay "pros" money for advice and coaching in starcraft 2 ranged from 10$/€ up to 300$ an hour.
Streaming:
You stream games and through commercials and ads you get a part of the revenues from the streaming website according to your viewer count. Top example TLo charity event: 2500$ for 24h casting. Hell i would be casting 2 days and do for the rest of the month nothing anymore
Casting:
Same as Streaming + ad revenue from vods
Tournaments:
Monthly "small-medium" tournaments add up to around 45-50k Dollar. Big tournament which appear more and more frequently are many times that much.
Sponsors:
Teams and Players are getting sponsored by Companies (mostly game related) and are even getting a montly salary
My opinion:
A person with a normal job works often for less than 10€/hour. Millions of people are playing video games all over the globe and a quite large portion of them excessivly.
Starcraft 2 is not a bad game by all means, for me it lacks quite a large part of the fun factor of playing video games which was sacrificed for the game to be balanced and a competitive, but still i think the money thrown at it, is totally out of proportion.
Does all of it really come from advertising cause i for one will never buy and have never bought any of the things I see in most ads when watching streams.
So how can there be so much money floating around starcraft 2 and where does it come from?
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sponsors by big companies.
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The biggest factor is by far sponsorships. Team sponsorships, individual sponsorships, tournament winnings subsidized by sponsorships.
Big companies pay big bucks to get big publicity from big events and big personas. This is evident in Razer's sponsorship of several major SC2 teams, Dr. Pepper at MLG, and other various companies throwing their hats in as well.
It's about promoting a "lifestyle", per se. Razer wants you to play SC2 with their mice and keyboards, Dr. Pepper wants you to drink their soda when you play, etc.
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Its like asking where models get their money from. >_>
Simple answer, sponsors.
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How money from streaming works.
bing tells "X streaming company" to air "Y amount of ads" and you get "Z amount of dollars". X then takes all revenue from ads UNTIL they make a contract with C gamer. Then, X realizes they have a more reliable way of selling Y, thus, they both mutually benefit X makes more Z and C now makes Z.
So in other words. Bing tells jtv they will give them $5 to show 1000 bing ads. jtv makes a partnership with idra. Idra shows 1000 bing ads. Idra gets $2. Jtv gets $3. Bing gets 1000 ads viewed.
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I have bought monster energy drinks they are pretty good
There are also people like FXO boss who are just rich and wants to own a team.
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Perhaps the better question is what kind of ROI these sponsors see when they pay for having their name plastered on all the advertising and banners for various events. However, I'm sure they, as economically rational entities, would only do something if it returned more than they put in.
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Although you personally may not invest in any products seen through advertising, millions of other people most certainly will. A big company has a few options when it comes to marketing their products, and one of those would obviously be a television commercial. The cost of this commercial would probably be in the tens of thousands if done well, and would reach out to alot of people that dont even use the product (like razer gaming gear). However, they can instead, pay a much smaller fee to a very popular player, and have him be their advertising method. Take TLO for example, his stream had 20,000 people and it stayed close to that for a full 24hours. Now these 20,000 people are all gamers, and all use gaming gear. Thus, razers audience is 100% geared towards their products, rather than half of the tv audience that doesnt even know what computer gaming is.
So, in the end, its more worth it for a company like razer to sponsor a popular player, and pay him to advertise their product to a directly interested market, rather than spend $20,000+ on a television commercial just to *possibly* reach out to a select market. This applies to many many companies involved in the computer / gaming industry.
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On May 30 2011 01:00 eXigent. wrote:
Although you personally may not invest in any products seen through advertising, millions of other people most certainly will. A big company has a few options when it comes to marketing their products, and one of those would obviously be a television commercial. The cost of this commercial would probably be in the tens of thousands if done well, and would reach out to alot of people that dont even use the product (like razer gaming gear). However, they can instead, pay a much smaller fee to a very popular player, and have him be their advertising method. Take TLO for example, his stream had 20,000 people and it stayed close to that for a full 24hours. Now these 20,000 people are all gamers, and all use gaming gear. Thus, razers audience is 100% geared towards their products, rather than half of the tv audience that doesnt even know what computer gaming is.
So, in the end, its more worth it for a company like razer to sponsor a popular player, and pay him to advertise their product to a directly interested market, rather than spend $20,000+ on a television commercial just to *possibly* reach out to a select market. This applies to many many companies involved in the computer / gaming industry.
I bought SteelSeries products mainly because, I saw a lot of gamers at tournaments use them.
So yeah, direct advertising certainly does work.
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Money comes from two sources: pay-to-watch, as we see in the NASL and GSL, and advertising. Companies believe that it is worth their money to advertise to us, so they will continue to advertise. I for one can't think of any time that I've bought something I've seen advertised because of the advertisement, but I guess it's a good business strategy. I'm not complaining if it sponsors a sport I enjoy watching.
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This is kind of like looking at a national track and field event and find it increduous that a hundred people around the world are paid to 'just run'.
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A lot of gaming companies sponsor gamers.
Then you have places like Monster and RedBull or CocaCola. They have a LARGE target audience in gamers, etc.
Same as any other sport really, but in a smaller scale. (football players get millions for example)
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A lot of people who play casually and start to watch don't even know who companies like Steelseries or Sapphire or Thermaltake are. Just getting their product visible to these players is worth the investment.
Then you have companies like Razer and Intel, AMD, MSI, that get to advertise high end products to the high end market directly.
As for streaming, that's self evident. The money is the same as people like sxePhil on youtube. If a ton of people watch you, a ton of people can watch your ads. I'm surprised that there isn't more direct sponsorship of streamers (though I think there will be in the future).
To be honest, the amount of money in SC2 is only going to grow. I see the market for advertising and viewership turning into something like youtube, where you have multiple players making six figures within 5 years.
The only difference is that youtube people have a bigger audience, because SC2 viewership is almost exclusively SC2 players. But, in the case of the tech companies advertising with us instead of casual youtubers, they can advertise high end products (again) that a more exclusing gaming community has more possibility to purchase.
I love this game :D
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I bough a Razer mouse because I needed one and I was alright with paying $10 more than another company because Razor sponsor esport.
I bough a Dr Pepper for the first time in 25 years instead of a Coke because I saw them sponsoring MLG.
I don't care about the cleaning product I see on JTV because I simply buy the cheapest currently on sale at the grocery store, I don't even know what brand the ads are about, or the brand I buy.
The sponsors made me aware/care/try about their product.
As for Intel, a company with a 11.4 billion net income, sponsoring GSL, they simply want to wipe AMD off the surface of Earth.
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To be honest, you can say that about almost anything that is played competitively.
As long as there are viewers, there is going to be a lot of money around it.
Just look as football for a prime example ;D, do some players really deserve to be paid 1mil+ for every game?
Maybe not, but do the advertisement companies and football teams feel that they are worth spending this much on? Looks like they do  .
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Everyone I know claims to not be affected by advertising and that they never buy the things they see advertised but the studies show differently. We are all influenced by the advertisements whether we realize it or not.
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First of all, compared to sports gaming doesn't really have THAT much money floating around, even though all the pro's are fulltime professionals.
(Also "A person with a normal job works often for less than 10€/hour." means that person is doing something wrong)
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+ Show Spoiler +
But seriously, I'm guessing mostly sponsors and what not, some guys who are really into ESPORTS probably give £50 or so for their own little tournament, i.e Craftcup.
But mostly sponsors.
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its silly to say that you never would buy a thing that is advertised (on streams) because if that would be the case no company would advertise their products would they?
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It comes mostly from big companies sponsoring tournaments or teams.
I wouldn't say it's worthless cause companies like Razer, Creative, ... have to have a good name in gaming scene.
And I for myself love to support companies that invest in the game that I like so much.
I enjoy watching pro streams and tourneys so much ... when it comes to a decision where 2 products from 2 different companies are both good and I have to buy one of them: I'll take the one from the supporting company.
And before you say: oh hell yay I would stream 2 days and chill for the rest of the month.
You should consider that you need a good name and be entertaining. How many people can live from streaming ? How much time do you have to invest to continusly play on top level ?
It's just a very little portion of the players that can realy live from starcraft 2 or in general from progaming. So don't overestimate.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images2/9/95/RichMineralField.png)
