It's plenty of different from other pro sports. The "pro" part largely means getting paid more than it takes to sustain the activity. With some exceptions like pro boxing which isn't exactly a poster boy for ethical practices.
It's not as different as you think. Base salary in minor league baseball, for instance, is ~US$1500 per month, and they only get paid during the season.
That obviously changes with service time -- and any service in the majors bumps it up disproportionately -- but guys who toil for 5 or 10 years in the minors without making it to the big club aren't getting rich.
Yeah, you see this in a lot of sports actually. I feel the biggest differentiator is whether there's a players union or not. The Minors appear to not have their own (I did not know this). Maybe this has to do with how much money the league generates, but I can't say because I don't know the details.
Boxing was already mentioned, but there's also MMA which is in the news right now for this very reason. If you're interested, look up the recent deal between the UFC and Reebok and how nearly all the fighters got screwed by this. Only the top players are getting taken care of, while plenty of others can't even get proper healthcare despite the fact we're talking about a combat sport here. It's unbelievable.
I imagine forming a union must be harder in individual sports rather than team sports. And with e-sports, most players' careers seem to be very short, which can't be helping matters if they ever wanted to form a union. Not much leverage for a variety of reasons.
You're exactly right about the lack of a players union being the reason for disproportionately low salaries in minor league baseball. The reason they don't have one is because the minor league clubs have no incentive to allow one, and the major league clubs that feed from the minor league systems have no incentive to help either. When there are so many guys willing to play for basically nothing but a shot at the bigs, meaningful change is unrealistic, although there are some ex-minor league players attempting to change that. It's likely very similar for other sports.
I believe that is a historical anomaly caused by the way the studio system treated stars and minor-league wanna-bes similarly for many years. When they did organize, they were unable to establish a clear line, major-league/minor-league, differentiation.
This is kind of an exception though when it comes to popular team sports and far as I know E-sport is still far from even those relatively bad pay and terms.
Not really. NBA D-League and minor league hockey salaries aren't exactly anything to write home about either.
And then there's football, where the "minor leagues" are 3 years unpaid in college, where you not only have to batter your body without getting paid, you also have to keep up academic performance at the same time (wouldn't it make more sense to make some money playing football trying to get to the NFL, and then if you don't make it, having that money to get an education if desired on your own schedule, without having to do both at once?).
I often wonder if this, or the similar Hollywood model, is where Silicon Valley will eventually end up. The model is already quite similar, the money at the bottom just hasn't been squeezed out the same way yet. But there is pressure on first time founders who raise funding to pay themselves the minimum at first "to keep them focused," and the same applies to early employee equity stakes. We even have the tech-scene focused gossip/hero-worship of the Hollywood or pro sports scenes down pat!
College football is amateur i.e. not professional.
You can go down any sport and find divisions that aren't paid very well, likewise you can find obscure sports that consider themselves professional but aren't very well paid either. I find none of this particularly relevant to the discussion. There are huge differences between how e-sport works and how professional sports organisations work and I guess the people who don't believe that will just have to remain ignorant.
SV is already there to some degree. With angel type funding you will spend most of you salary on living expenses which won't return very good quality of life.
The "amateur" state of college football is a joke. It's the only option. It's a de-facto minor leagues for the NFL. The NFL benefits from being able to scout these players through it without having to draft or pay them earlier. The college athletic departments benefit from having found a revenue stream far larger than any other minor league, yet still not having to pay the players who generate that revenue. Heck, even the athletes in other sports get more real benefit than the college football players, since that's a lot of what's funding their scholarships. The football players are in a weird position of playing in front of 50-90,000 adoring fans every week just like they would in the NFL, but seeing nothing more than a scholarship and some stipends.
You haven't explained the huge differences. The vast majority of post-high-school players in any sport are doing it despite it being either a poor financial decision or simply part of a system that's inherently rigged against those players. The 1% get fame and fortune, the 99% wash out with nothing to show for it but years of little income. E-sport aspirants get even less to show for it? It doesn't seem very meaningful to quibble over the difference between "very little" and "practically nothing."
Since I'm going to give up my HN activities after this I'll humor you with a response.
While the line between amateur and professional sports have been blurred there are still very real differences. Amateur athletes aren't well compensated, but they are protected from the world of contracts, agents, transfers etc.
People give golf or tennis as examples of professional sports where you can struggle as a professional, which is laughable for anyone who knows sports history. These are sports that because of their status has kept a lot of the original characteristics of amateurism in sports (which from the beginning is a status i.e. upper class thing). Countries which have adopted to a modern amateur approach (with government support, non-profit organisations etc) to those sports have also been punching above their weight.
So what is huge difference between e-sports and other professional sports? For one they don't actually own their sport. I'm not a huge intellectual property fan, but in the case of professional sports it's hugely important. It's the basis for most if not all professional sports organisations. Most of e-sports does not make any salary, if they do or even if the don't they are signed to a team which takes part winnings in tournaments. So you have a situation where it's hard to make a living like in amateur sports, but you don't have the support network or limits of the same. At the same time you have to deal with the contracts and incentives from professional sport, but you don't get the benefits of intellectual property deals and major leagues and therefor salaries.
To some degree this is changing, especially in Korea, but it's still more of a business than a sport. Sports at it's core is competition to find out who is the best. You do that by having fairly similar conditions over a longer time. That's what amateur and professional sport organisations do or, at least, should do.
That said I'm not even sure the discussion should be about if e-sports is a professional or amateur sport, but if it's organized enough to be either or for that matter even considered a sport at all. Is chess a sport? How about poker? Or day trading? Fashion modeling?
I find myself having a severe lack of motivation while writing this, but hopefully it made some sense.
Thats not true in the slightest. I know a pro strongman who doesn't make enough in prize money to cover his training, let alone flying to contests, and I used to work in pro tennis where the bottom tier (still pro players) are borrowing money and living off relatives and national sports grants.
I think you're missing one thing though. Recognition makes it possible for more people, which otherwise wouldn't or couldn't, to have that same experience.
When it comes to visas everyone wants to be special. Unfortunately the international recognized way of being special is having a bachelors degree. If that wasn't a requirement it would probably be even harder skilled workers to get visas. It sounds like if you work a couple of more years you can apply for an E-2 visa and hopefully avoid the H1-B lottery. That is not a bad position to be in. Considering the outlook for someone wanting to immigrate to the US to drive a cab I wouldn't be very bothered by that either.
BC degree is a bullshit you can literally buy it in many countries. By buying i mean you pay for tuition and you visit the school for 2 years and then you get a degree. But not only is that very expensive for most of the people in post-soviet countries but also worthless.
They will not teach you anything useful. Not even when you apply for CS. They exploit the post-soviet system.
And there are many good people in these countries. Not exceptional, not 1% of mathematicians,physicists or ninja programmers but better than the average.
Yet they did not get a chance.
Actually if we talk about post-Soviet countries some degrees there have value. They teach physics and math really good, otherwise, why would there be so many talented Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian programmers? When it comes to social studies, economics, law, not so much, but if someone got degree from place like MFTI it's probably gives that person more credit that degree from average US university.
I agree. Post Soviet countries had really good education.
My Hungarian Bsc level maths/cs degree was way more difficult than my UK masters or my second masters in Belgium.
You needed to learn and you had to think, not only buff back the knowledge. Also the competition was quite high. Still, the universities of my masters' are in the top 200 and the Hungarian university is not in the top 500.
Well, that's life. But I still was not able to get a visa (to be ontopic).
"I just think that its term of protection is long since expired."
Why do you think that, it hasn't been 95 years since 1935, or is that a suggestion?
"I think things like literature, theater, and so on have considerable social utility and don't care for your restriction to industrial applications."
I get that you think that, but it has no basis in intellectual property law. It's entirely the opposite, the more utility something has the less protection it gets.
Personally I think that 95 years is too long. I don't think it should be longer than the average person's life span. But there is evidence that happy birthday was published at least as early as 1912, so how can it still be under copyright?
It is a broken system which does not help the artist' family but it benefits companies. This article from 2002 after Congress extended copyright from life plus 50 years to life plus 70. http://articles.latimes.com/2002/mar/03/opinion/op-tasini
'Term of protection' == 'any valid copyright claim it might once had had or been eligible for if properly registered, as opposed to the questionable claims of the current licensors'. I don't want to type all that out every time, and I don't want to make a possibly-inaccurate claim that it was never ever in copyright because I haven't checked all the primary sources for myself.
That's why I referred you to external sources for the lawsuit, because I don't want to make definitive comments about the legal merits of either side's case in this thread - it's been a few months since I even looked through the complaint.
I'm not sure how hard it is to say "[copyright claim] is not valid". It's kind of hard to discuss thing if you come up with your own meaning of things.
People havn't been paying attention. This market isn't about selling an 8$ thing for 9, 12 or 15. It's about selling a 1$ thing for 10 and a 4$ thing for 40. Which they probably are with the accessories.
