It’s the lot of every sports fan to sit on the sofa watching their stars play and think, “I could do that if I tried,” safe in the knowledge that no one is ever going to call them on that claim.
It’s no different in eSports, the world of professional video games. In fact, the temptation to cast yourself as an undiscovered star is all the greater, given the general absence of any physical feats of strength or agility.
Professional video gaming differs from traditional sports in other ways too. One of the more interesting ones is a genuine flow from casual to professional.
No matter how good you are during your Sunday kickabouts in the park or your weekly squash matches, winning them won’t see you steadily rise the ranks, eventually taking on the best in the world for prestige and glory.
But in gaming, they can. In late November, I decided I would try. How hard can it be to become a professional gamer, really? Surely, I thought, the biggest hurdle is just finding the time to try. So I decided to go full-time for a week to see if I could make it.
Early on in a secret Paladin game.
I played Hearthstone, a digital collectible card game based on the venerable Warcraft franchise (including World of Warcraft, among others). Launched by mega-publisher Activision Blizzard in spring 2014, it’s steadily grown to become one of the most disruptive forces in gaming.
Like many games harboring dreams of eSports dominance, it’s free-to-play, with daily victories earning gold, which can be used to buy new cards to build out your collection. Naturally, those cards can also be bought with real money, and the most dedicated players (including the Guardian’s technology editor) have dropped hundreds of pounds on these digital collectibles.
Buying packs.
The game’s creators haven’t disclosed how valuable it is to them, but one recent study suggested it brought in around $20m (£14m) a month for the company. That’s not surprising: free-to-play games can, if they take off, be extraordinary earners. Their player base grows quickly because the barrier to entry is almost non-existent. Yet, the amount of money they can pull in from the most dedicated players (“whales”) is usually far more than the £40-£60 a traditional game can charge as a one-off fee. One player I know, an executive at a London-based startup, only plays decks made from “golden” cards, a purely cosmetic difference that costs two to 10 times as much as the normal cards. He declined to estimate how much he had spent on the game when I asked.
Casual players like me often focus on playing the game to maximize the amount of in-game currency they earn. But in the background is a second motivation, one that can take over alarmingly easily.
The game offers a ranked play mode, which randomly pits players against each other, winning and losing ranks as they play. Rise high enough in the ranks, and you hit the Legend rank. There, your ranking stops being equivalent to your tier (rank one players being best and rank 25 being worst) and becomes your actual place in the cohort of the best players in the world. Moreover, simply reaching that tier brings you a step towards qualifying for the world championships; the higher you rank, the more points you get on your scorecard. Get enough points, and an invitation to the regional qualifiers can come your way.
Win the regional qualifiers, and you get invited to the world championships; win those, and a $100,000 prize is yours. All you have to do is win an awful lot of video games. That sounded appealing. I play an awful lot of video games, so who’s to say I can’t win a lot? As it turns out, my editor, for one. He said there were two problems with the idea – neither of which were that I’m not actually particularly good at Hearthstone. Instead, his issues were more specific. “Firstly, you’re not even as good as me. And secondly … what’s the highest rank you’ve ever reached?” It was 15. The highest is one; the lowest is 25. He had a point.
Victory at last.
But I wasn’t going to let my quest to be a pro gamer be deterred by a little thing like not being very good at Hearthstone. And I was buoyed in that decision after speaking to Andrey Yanyuk, better known as Reynad, one of the most successful professional Hearthstone players. “Hearthstone’s just a verya shallow-cap game,” he told me. “If … you’re playing several hours a day, you’re pretty much gonna be at the same skill level as most people playing the game at a professional level. It’s very estraightforwardt that skill ceiling in Hearthstone. Once you hit it, you have the same odds of winning as anyone else. It’s just how the game works. But Reynad also introduced me to another thing to consider when striding out as a pro player: winning tournaments is not actually a good way to make a living.
Sure, the world championship has a grand prize of $100,000 – a nice income for any job, particularly video games. But only one person can win that, and the rewards decline precipitously as you get further down the ranking. Unlike other head-to-head sports such as tennis, for example, there’s not really a championship circuit. And unlike physical sports, there’s only really one Hearthstone tournament to consider: the official, Blizzard-run world championships. Fail to win that, and you have to wait another year for your chance at big money.
What’s more, even if you are really (really) good, the game itself is fairly open to punishing amounts of random chance. One popular card has a 1.5% chance of wiping the board clean; another has a 400% swing in the amount of damage it will randomly do on the board. The best players will learn to manage the randomness, but that still hasn’t stopped tournaments being decided on a roll of the virtual dice.
So the more consistent way to make a living playing Hearthstone might not be to head for the top of the tournaments but instead, focus on building up an audience eager to watch you play. That’s what several Hearthstone professionals do, turning to the streaming platform Twitch to play games in front of adoring fans. Reynad began streaming online card games, not with Hearthstone, but with Magic: the Gathering Online (MtGO), the digital version of the venerable MtG card game.
Offline, Magic is a big deal: the game’s creator, Richard Garfield, pretty much invented the concept of a collectible card game, and it’s dominated the genre for almost all of its 20-year lifespan (at the peak of its popularity, the Pokémon trading card game may just have eclipsed it). Online, however, it never quite took off in the same way; it largely gained an audience of people who wanted to play the physical card game but couldn’t.
And so Reynad, who estimates he was streaming to 90% of the total audience for the game, peaked with around 600 viewers. When Hearthstone was released, he saw his opportunity. “Hearthstone was just a better version of everything Magic was trying to do,” he explains. “It was basically the same game, the same fundamental resource system, so it was everything I was already good at. “I saw it come out, and thought ‘this is the only skill set I have, and this game will be big.’ I was seeing it hold like 3,000 viewers in the first week of beta, and I was like, ‘wow, I could be way more entertaining than Trump [early streaming success Jeffrey Shih’s username] … and way better.
