American Team Gets $7 Million For Winning DOTA 2 Championship

Megalith

Megalith

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You really ought to stop playing those dumb video games; you're just wasting your life away. Oh wait.

In an hours-long match at KeyArena in Seattle, Wa. on Saturday, American eSports team "Evil Geniuses" beat out "CDEC" to take first place at The International (TI5). Evil Geniuses took home $6.6 million of the tournament's overall $18,416,970 prize pool.
 
people like to say "get a real job". "real" as in "flip burgers" or "sit in a cubicle all day. people should do what they like and in most cases money will follow if you're good.
 
Even 16th place is a pretty chunk of change even if it needs to be split
 
temujin987 said:
people like to say "get a real job". "real" as in "flip burgers" or "sit in a cubicle all day. people should do what they like and in most cases money will follow if you're good.
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Honestly no different than people who get paid millions to play a sport (game) that millions of kids play for free every day.
 
temujin987 said:
people like to say "get a real job". "real" as in "flip burgers" or "sit in a cubicle all day. people should do what they like and in most cases money will follow if you're good.
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Well, I don't know much about this championship. But I did watch the documentary about a previous DOTA championship.

And I can tell you I am absolutely not jealous of ANY of the people I saw in that documentary. It seemed to me that it took a very unfortunate series of events in ones life to make them focus that much energy on a video game.
 
I followed the Turney from start to finish. Valve made a killing on this.Its a pro sport like anything else. Its acceptance as a legitimate form of sport is coming along well. Even ESPN covered the event. These people deserve the money as much as any pro athlete.
 
eSports *snerk* are indeed a lot like other so-called "professional" sports where they bait losers who otherwise have nothing else going for them into becoming effective at repeating the same series of motions over and over again promising some paltry amount of money that the aforementioned people think is a lot because they've never actually earned a reasonable sum in their lives. The good news is that no matter how silly and meaningless something is, there'll always be people mindless enough to worship it and ensure there's a market for it.
 
Here's what I don't get about dota. It doesn't have near the following of league, it isn't even remotely entertaining to watch, yet somehow the prize pools are bigger... I'm confused.
 
westrock2000 said:
Well, I don't know much about this championship. But I did watch the documentary about a previous DOTA championship.

And I can tell you I am absolutely not jealous of ANY of the people I saw in that documentary. It seemed to me that it took a very unfortunate series of events in ones life to make them focus that much energy on a video game.
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Getting paid well while having fun. Sounds terrible
 
dgz said:
NWEXNmo.gif


Getting paid well while having fun. Sounds terrible
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Remaining relevant for competition at the highest level for ANYTHING is NOT fun. It's soul sucking work. I lost all passion for playing football when I made the jump from high school to a D1 college program because it literally consumed my life. It went from being a fun team activity to focusing EVERY BIT of my life into a game. Most people have similar experiences. I'd imagine it's no different than these DOTA players.
 
Grahamkracka said:
Remaining relevant for competition at the highest level for ANYTHING is NOT fun. It's soul sucking work. I lost all passion for playing football when I made the jump from high school to a D1 college program because it literally consumed my life. It went from being a fun team activity to focusing EVERY BIT of my life into a game. Most people have similar experiences. I'd imagine it's no different than these DOTA players.
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You're right, it isn't fun by any definition. It's like being a paid game tester. People think that's fun and it couldn't be less fun. You do something like this because you have a passion for it. The actual work is as draining as it gets. Most of these gamers put more hours per week into mastering one specific ability than most people work in two. Anyone who think pro gaming is fun or easy has no clue.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Most of these gamers put more hours per week into mastering one specific ability than most people work in two. Anyone who think pro gaming is fun or easy has no clue.
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Yeah the last starcraft documentary I saw was a minimum of 10 hours of game time a day. This doesn't include time in lobby, eating, strategy discussions, coach criticisms etc. That may be fun for a week but after month / years it's a job. From what I can tell there are few if any "Professional Gamers". They are all professional DOTA players, starcraft players, cs players etc. You need to be prepared to devoting your life to a single game for years. You don't have time to go enjoy other video games for fun.
 
I love playing Dota 2, but I could never do it professionally. I enjoy playing it, but only because it's a game. If I had to spend every waking moment learning all the tricks, learning what counters what, learning all the stats of my opponents, devising strategies to beat certain combos... I've never enjoy it. Yes, if I won, I'd love the money, but the odds of that happening are 0 to me.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Here's what I don't get about dota. It doesn't have near the following of league, it isn't even remotely entertaining to watch, yet somehow the prize pools are bigger... I'm confused.
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Why do NFL players make more than CFL players? You get more sponsors, you get more money. But they're really the same game, maybe more talent on the NFL side of things, but at the core it's the same. Somewhere someone manage to convince a lot more companies to donate/buy advertising/etc and that's where the money comes from.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Why do NFL players make more than CFL players? You get more sponsors, you get more money. But they're really the same game, maybe more talent on the NFL side of things, but at the core it's the same. Somewhere someone manage to convince a lot more companies to donate/buy advertising/etc and that's where the money comes from.
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It's not really the sponsors, it's the players. Valve has a system for International in which you buy something called a compendium. It rewards you with virtual items and allows you to use it to gamble items or make guesses on the outcome of matches. Every purchase of one of those goes towards the prize pool. Valve has even added a tiered reward system similar to kickstarter so the more people buy the more rewards the community receives. It's a genius design and the reason the DOTA2 International prize pool reaches record breaking levels.

Other DOTA2 tournaments try offering the same thing but it's nowhere near the scale of Valves Compendium system.
 
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