What's the career progression for streamers and eSports players, anyway? I feel like everyone that does this now is going to be tired of it in 5 years, and then they're just 30 and without a college degree or job experience.
I know a few ex-YouTubers, and they're all doing just fine. Working in PR, marketing, agents for other creators, etc. Sure, they don't all have a degree... but they have a ton of connections and relevant experience.
Any of the giants should hopefully have been saving there money and have quite a bunch tucked away. Any of the smaller ones should have been doing something on the side, or at least have a plan B ready.
Also, not sure why we're assuming no college degree here.
Or that running a successful business for a decade doesn't count as experience that most businesses would be happy to hire on. Being a successful twitch streamer involves extremely good time management and a lot of hands on advertising. They've got a lot more proof of successful marketing than most PR folks you might look at hiring.
Nowadays there are financial planners focusing on content creators/streaming talent who will know the specifics of tax structures and advantages, etc. as well.
But what if you're not one of the top streamers, and you just get 250 viewers a few times a week? I watch a lot of people like that. It seems to pay for room and board, but I worry about their future.
Why is that a problem? Nobody cares for the millions of people that try to be professional athletes, musicians, artists or dancers that are barely making ends meet and ultimately move on to something else.
This is just like any other endeavor. Many try, most fail, some succeed wildly. We don't need to feel bad for the people that try and fail. That is part of life and progressing as a person.
What's the alternative? Alot of these people are great entertainers and terrible <anything else>. If they weren't streaming they'd be working shifts at McDonalds. If anything they're doing the most advantageous thing they could be doing.
The same career path as a professional athlete. Some go into commentating, some go into sports management, and most retire broke and have to pick up a whole new career in their late 20s/early 30s.
Twitch streaming can be extremely practical if you're being sustainable about it. Assuming you're actually watching your income and expenses and being smart about when to hire on additional help you can make a pretty darn successful career. I'd point to T90[1] as an example of someone that isn't near the top 1% but has built an extremely sustainable business including paid moderators and content editors (for sending clips to YouTube).
The skills and experience they've picked up directly translates to a number of "practical" careers: affiliate marketing, social media marketing, PR, community building, video and audio editing, etc. not to mention game-related careers in eSports, game development, etc.
There are quite a few streamers who have been doing it for more than a decade at this point with no sign of slowing down.
On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to sell the skill of building a large following to employers, and plenty of companies looking for people who are experts in social media/streaming platforms.
why does every endeavor require career progression? its [Current Year] can't people just enjoy something, take the money and invest it, then go to college, start a business, make a RE empire?
Ask a few military vets, many legitimately just start at the bottom at the totem some place novel into their mid 30s.
Right? Can't you just enjoy being in a good place and stay there?
Maybe I'm jaundiced because I just had to fill out my annual review self-assessment and skipped the "5-year plan" because I simply couldn't be bothered to lie about it.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but cars are the definition of an absolutely terrible investment - they might beat out randomly hoping you'll land big on r/wallstreetbets but both are extremely poor investment decisions.
Ordinary cars are a strongly depreciating asset. However, above a certain level this stops being true. I had the fortune to buy, use and subsequently sell a number of higher end cars (Ferrari, Lamborghini) and I made little to no loss on any of them. In fact, the Ferrari 458, which to this day I consider the best supercar to drive, appreciated during the year or so I had it.
It sounds like the cars might have slightly more than broken even on cost for you which sounds like a terrible investment option when you've got everything from real estate to mutual funds that will generally outperform cars - and, much like stock picking, most of the models you purchased didn't significantly appreciate - just one ended up gaining in value.
I suppose I was misinformed in that I thought that cars of all value ranges were pretty disastrous assets to hold - but it sounds like holding on to them for value appreciation still isn't a particularly good tactic.
When you have enough cash on hand to buy one, chances are you already have investments in money-returning assets, and you're diversifying into entertainment-returning ones. No point making a bunch of money just to spend it all on making more money. If you can tie up a bundle of cash for a year, get a bunch of entertainment out of it, then liquidate for approximately the same amount, who is to complain?
I'm assuming they were making a comment about the value of classic cars. Some of them could absolutely be a good investment, if, (big, giant, planet sized) if you know what you are doing.
We have decades of examples of how this works out for pro athletes. The answer is that there's a range of outcomes: some have to find new careers after their playing days are over; others find ancillary work (coaching, scouting) in the sports industry; the very best make enough money that they don't need to work anymore. In many cases, the athletes have a college degree of at least some value.
Professional video game streaming is relatively new. It's a valid question.
It's a valid question, but the answer is simple: nearly the same thing that sports players do when they stop being the player. They either coach, manage, promote their brand, or switch careers.
One concern I could see in e-sports vs traditional (and I don't follow e-sports closely, so maybe I'm wrong) is that the games being played change regularly. Do the skills of a top player of one generation of games tend to translate well to coaching top players for the next generation of games, or would any such coach look more like Ted Lasso?
I'm sure professional athletes in non-traditional physical sports have had to face the same questions — e.g. Tony Hawk. And in reality a lot of people put in professional levels of effort into traditional sports without reaping the kind of career-defining rewards one would associate with "professional athletes".
Yes. A lot of professional athletes don’t really make much money. They get normal salaries and play for non major league teams or federations of some sort.
Eventually though they will have to quit their sport due to wear and tear and no longer being at a peak level. And most will probably never really progress to a level where they can make some quick millions from a contract and then retire early.
I'm a proponent of the idea that your athletic scholarship at a Division I-A school should be for "sports degree" and that it should entitle you to come back prepaid for an "academic" 4 year degree when that track runs out.
That would stop a lot of the idiocy we see around "student athletes".
I know an ex-WoW professional player. He didn't make a ton of money. After it was over he went back to school, and is now a very talented software engineer.
Doing anything at a high level tends to cultivate skills that translate to other areas. General skills like focus and discipline come to mind.
Reminds me of Travis Morrison, lead singer of the indie band The Dismemberment Plan who were popular in the 90s/early 2000s. After his retirement from music he became a web developer who at one point worked for the washington post and huffington post.
His girlfriend (now wife) describes the experience of being with someone who was once somewhat famous in this article [0] -- There were moments of extreme cognitive dissonance when I saw him up there. He’s a wild and expert showman on stage. As I’d watch him do things like play the keyboard by smashing it with his forehead, spit water all over the audience or writhe convulsively on the ground, I would think, “I can’t believe this is the same man who likes to go to bed at 10 o’clock and sweetly brings me coffee in bed every morning.”
If someone is an esports player, it would be hard to stay a professional (in most action games at least) at age 30 simply due to natural wear on your hands and reaction times getting slower.
This doesn't really make sense. Athletes in many sports are playing way past their 'prime' these days and they are wearing out much more than just their hands. Consistently good reaction times are a result of consistent training. Plenty of older baseball/tennis players have superhuman reaction times. I would see mental fatigue and boredom as being the major hurdle to playing esports on a professional level at an older age. No matter how fun it started as, 10+ years of looking at the same thing over and over has got to be soul sucking.
It's counterintuitive, but if you look at eSports players, the prime years are much lower (both the start and the end). You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds. It feels like the prime is really 16-25. Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important, and hands are one of the worst things to wear out. More parts != more wear out. There's a reason why there are (general) physical therapists and physical therapists who specialize in hands. Hands are incredibly complex and soft tissue injuries heal very poorly due to lack of blood supply.
I doubt the boredom thing is that different for sports vs eSports. At least with eSports the game is changing due to patches. With sports, the game itself hardly changes.
eSports players spend a lot more time playing than normal athletes. You can only be physically active for a few hours per day. eSports players can do a lot more, like tyler1 who consistently streams for 10+ hours 5 days a week.
Normal athletes arguably also get more variation. Football players don't play back to back football matches all day every day, they practice and improve in a lot of other ways. They also get more variation due to traveling around to play away games.
Its not really counterintuitive, the prime years are lower because true physical development in physical sports starts at a later age, everything up to that point is related to building a physical foundation for movement, building an interest in the sport, and laying groundwork for proper mechanics.
There is also societal stigma from playing video games seriously past early 20s(well atleast 5-10+ years ago, but with Twitch and things it is now way more accceptable).
"Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important" is laughable.
1. Most professional athletes have very short careers.
2. The athletes who do play "past their prime" are usually making up for reduced physical acuity with other skills (e.g. you don't see very many baseball players hit triples after 30).
3. Players with long careers invest a huge amount of time in conditioning, and to a hard-to-measure degree, PEDs.
4. I don't really follow eSports; If someone played Starcraft competitively 20 years ago, are they still playing SC, or do they switch to something else like LoL? What's the typical competitive "lifetime" of a game? If you picked up game-specific skills, it might be harder to apply #2 when the game du-jour changes.
5. As a slight nitpick to the whole conversation, my understanding is that "reaction time" is perhaps a misnomer; the drop in reaction time with age for performing a simple activity appears to be relatively minor, but more complex activities (including habitual ones like driving), which suggests that the performance decline is in selecting and/or executing the proper response to a stimuli rather than what we think of as pure "reaction time"
In physical sports the barrier to entry is very high. Even if you have good reaction time, high strength, etc. you will still need 1000s of hours of practice from a very young age to excel.
In e-sports there's millions of people practicing every day and the built in ranking system can filter that down to the current top 0.1%. At this point branching out into actual competitions is not nearly as difficult as getting noticed by a NBA, NFL, etc. recruiter.
It does depend on the Game. CSGO players play a very limited number of maps so pure reaction time and hand-eye coordination is often the deciding factor. Strategy games like LoL and softer FPS games like Fortnite are less dependent on physical talent.
The ranking system in physical and mental sports is essentially the same, it comes down to: 'can you beat or compete with X person consistently', and just for context...there were over a million high school football players participating in 2019, and this is mostly in organized play. If I want to get noticed in League, I have to grind a queue for ungodly amount of hours to get to a respectable ranking and then solicit myself to teams for proper team based competition...good luck with all that.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest 30 years is a number of much importance for this. Most Esports scenes also aren't old enough to have older players as well.
The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while.
In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.
I think a decent few of them find positions in related fields like talent management or esports. They do probably develop pretty decent relationships in those industries.
You could ask the same of any developer in their 30s or 40s, most of whom earn less per year than the subject of TFA, and who similarly will have trouble finding work in their field in 10-20 years (if the ageism doesn't go away).
What's the big deal starting at age 30? you still got another 30 years to work at least, if not more. You just study some profession and start working in the field.
