« Guest Editorial: "Us and Them: Competitive Gaming Reality Check" by John Gallagher »

John "SweetJohnnyCage" Gallagher. Photo courtesy of Robert Paul/East Coast ThrowdownBuckle up, it’s time for a reality check. I’m here to talk about a few things: infrastructure, sponsors and getting players more money to further their careers. My hope is that by the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of the bigger picture of our gaming culture.

The larger discussion that plagues our scene is “FGC vs. eSports.” Let me get my first opinion out of the way: It’s all competitive gaming. We all do the same thing, play video games. Some are team based, some are single player. The only thing that separates “us” from “them” is the scale of events. But even then, I just really hate this us-versus-them mentality; it doesn’t do anyone any bit of good! Yes, there are distinct differences in how our events work. First-person shooters (FPS) work differently from real-time strategy (RTS), just like fighters work differently from rhythm games (something a lot of us played before fighters). When I ran my first Third Strike tournament, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that there was no qualifier song in order to determine seeding; that’s how it is in rhythm games. However, once I figured out how it worked, things ran largely the same. There were brackets, people played each other and there was a winner at the end. Simple enough.

But that’s not why we’re here. No, we’re here because some people still don’t get it. The most common thing we hear in our scene is prize pools need to be bigger. Basically, players want more money to win. And they should! You guys—I’m speaking as an event organizer—deserve more than what you’re currently getting at tournaments. Most of the top players out there have dedicated their entire daily life to playing games in order to be the best and keep winning these events. That said, there are things that many of you are blaming the wrong people for. News flash time! Prize pots are great, but they are not important in the long run. I know Carl “Perfect Legend” White has tweeted this before, but was largely ignored because Twitter just isn’t a good place for these types of conversations. Emmanuel “CDJr” Brito also stated, “It's time to let big companies take over so they can push our games even more. Cause IMO shit WILL stay the same unless that happens.”

This is a very flawed statement on a few levels. Mainly, what big companies are you talking about? Last I checked, Major League Gaming doesn’t run many fighting games for more than a couple of years. Why? Because it’s not profitable. Sony was a large investor during the MK9/KoF/SC5 time of MLG, but a number of factors, including conflicting events, hurt MLG's attendance during these tournaments. And I can’t recall any one event organizer telling players to boycott MLG. I’m pretty sure I’m on film somewhere telling players to go to MLG, support their game, and win the big money. They’d be dumb not to!

Here’s where I’m going to address the problem you’re all missing. As I said, and Perfect Legend said as well, prize pots are not significant in the long term. But allow me to elaborate as to why that is, because a lot of you don’t see the big picture. Let’s just say Capcom dumped $50,000 into the prize pot at Evo one year. Sick, I’d enter SF4 for $50,000! But what does that get them? There always has to be a return on investment (ROI) for companies who invest in tournaments. Let me type that again so you can read it again: invest in tournaments. One more time. Invest in tournaments. This is what a lot of people are clamoring for. Big companies investing in tournaments. THIS IS NOT IMPORTANT. What is important, however, is game developers investing in the infrastructure of their competitive scenes.

Here’s an example of a game that 27 million people play daily: League of Legends. Riot Games, the developer/publisher of League, has invested an insurmountable sum of money—which they turn no profit on, directly—into their League Championship Series (LCS) platform. However, through the insane amount of brand awareness this series has created, more people are playing League now than ever. How does one compete in the LCS? Not easily. Let me tell you how League of Legends, and its own game client, feeds players into the LCS.

First off, League of Legends is 100% online, aside from a handful of LAN tournaments. Because of this, Riot is able to track and provide you with comprehensive statistics on your player profile, along with every other player in the world. It’s always watching, it’s always tracking. Spooky, but not NSA spooky. Once you hit max level on your Summoner Profile (level 30), you can begin to played ranked matches. Players then play 10 (used to be 5) provisional matches and are placed into a ranking ladder. The lowest you can go is Bronze 5, and the ladder goes from Bronze 5-Bronze 1. After Bronze 1, you move to Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and finally, the coveted Challenger ladder. Challenger is where dreams start to come to fruition. Challenger players are often picked up for competitive teams, sponsored and they often garner a huge amount of Twitch viewers at any hour of the day. Getting to Challenger is no easy task, not everyone can do it. Just like how not everyone can be great at fighting games. But if you do make it, oh man, it’s sweet.

Gallagher poses with fellow organizers of The Fall Classic Larry "ShinBlanka" Dixon, Joe "LI Joe" Ciaramelli and Eric "Big E" Small. Photo courtesy of TFCTournament.comI want you all to take note at how Riot has built their entire competitive circuit right into the game itself. There are no open format tournaments like we have in fighting games (which makes us unique and different!), it’s all online. It’s all tracked: every stat, every death, every kill, every pentakill and every item bought. It’s not a perfect system—there are toxic players that make your gameplay experience less than enjoyable—but it works, and it works well. The League of Legends game client allows Riot to structure their own competitive scene with a coherency the FGC doesn’t have. It allows them to directly engage with their playerbase and community every time they double click the icon on their desktops. Fighting game players want stat tracking in order to have a better, clearer seeding structure. This is one way to do it. But in order to do that, we’d have to take away the ability to play every fighting game offline, except at tournaments.

Because Riot has created a client that tracks every stat of every player, players can level up (both skill and ladder) and begin to compete. But Riot didn’t just stop there. No, the LCS is run by Riot Games too. It’s all in-house. Sure, MLG and Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) run League of Legends tournaments too, but the world championship tournament that sold out The Staples Center last September was run by Riot Games. That was part of their LCS. And that’s why it works so incredibly well. The same thing can be said for Valve and Dota 2. The International 3, an event put on specifically for Dota 2 with an insane $2.8 million prize pool, was run by Valve. Part of the prize pool was actually crowdfunded by players when they purchased an in-game item.

These are not the “big companies” that CDJr is talking about. These are the developers and publishers of these games putting on the events. They are investing in the infrastructure of their competitive scenes. Prize pots come second. They first have to be able to sell the event and the tournament circuit to sponsors. Riot currently has American Express and Coca-Cola sponsoring the LCS and Challenger circuit, respectively. What better way to do it than to keep it all in-house? If you’re slightly confused by this point, I understand. It was actually my mission to make it hard to follow. I want you to see that it’s not as simple as “Capcom should dump money in the pot.” Infrastructure is 100 times more important than prize pots, and Riot got it right.

That brings me to my next point: sponsors. I’ve been approached by a lot of people asking me to help them get noticed by sponsors. But the term sponsor is very vague, and a lot of people don’t realize the amount of work it takes to get a sponsor. A lot of fighting game players see League, Dota 2 and “Insert game here” teams and expect to be able to garner the same sponsors that these teams have worked for years to get. Let me explain, very quickly, why it’s incredibly easy for PC teams and tournaments to get more sponsors: THEIR INDUSTRY IS BIGGER. Marcus “djWheat” Graham has said this on Live On Three along with his other shows and streams countless times, and I’ve echoed it, but a lot of players scoffed at him and just straight up ignored what he had to say. Console games are restricted to console makers—Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo—and the developers. But again, what’s the return on investment for console makers and developers? Sell products to people who already have them? Come on, use your head. This is why accessory manufacturers like Mad Catz and apparel companies like Brokentier are staple sponsors to our scene. They directly provide the parts we need to play and engage with us directly.

PCs are built with numerous parts from dozens of manufacturers and a lot of them directly sponsor PC gaming teams. For example, the team SK Gaming is sponsored by Kingston, who mainly makes memory (RAM). Nvidia sponsors events, AMD sponsors events and ASUS as well. You name it, a company is sponsoring a team or an event. The range of sponsors to approach in PC gaming eclipses that of console gaming. It’s a sad reality, but that’s how it is. PC games reach a much broader market, and therefore there’s more opportunity for investment capital to be found. Until fighters are played primarily on PC instead of console, then it’s going to stay like that. But there’s some food for thought, folks. Would you be willing to make the jump and play on PC if it meant more sponsors coming into the scene? Has anyone actually considered that? Would you be willing to invest a thousand or so dollars in a new PC every seven to eight years if there was a slight chance of that happening? Risk is good, people.

My final point, getting players more money. This might be a tough pill to swallow for some. A lot of you need to wake up and smell the coffee. Be inventive and create ways to make yourself money in this scene. “eSports” players and teams have already done this. I don’t know why people think money just grows on trees for these guys. You can’t just open up XSplit and expect money to flow in. Create content and get yourself noticed by a sponsor! SELL YOURSELVES! Create a brand, or even create apparel (Underground Syndicate, anyone?). The money will never be handed to you because of your tournament performance. That’s just the start. Create a GOOD personality. Don’t flame people (and devs) on Twitter and expect results. That’s just dumb. The inventive ones are the ones who make it ahead, and the ones left behind are the ones complaining. Don’t be that guy or girl. If you want it bad enough, work towards it. Event organizers have worked for the events they run and the reputations they have. It’s our job to provide you with a great tournament experience that makes you come back the next year. We’ll keep doing it for as long as time allows us. If a company came to me and said, “Hey, we want you to run our events for X game,” I’d jump at the opportunity, as should anyone. Aren’t we all working towards a career in the industry?

This scene has become very shortsighted over the years. It’s time you all started thinking long term. Set goals for yourself and work towards them. We are a community, one of the best in the world, but everyone has to realize that events are put on by folks that are taking money out of their weekly paychecks to put them on. We don’t have tons of investment capital. We’ve built our brands from the ground up, and we still have a long way to go. The same goes for you, players. I can’t stress this enough: market yourselves, don’t expect money to fall out of the sky. The ones who you never hear complaining are the ones who have done just that.

John “SweetJohnnyCage” Gallagher is an event organizer and has helped create East Coast Throwdown and The Fall Classic 2013. The views and opinions reflected in this article are the culmination of his years of experience in multiple competitive gaming scenes. Follow him on Twitter @SJCage or on Facebook.com/SweetJohnnyCage.