P-sports and E-sports?
There is little difference aside from broken bodies.
From the October 29, 2019 New York Times*, we see the headline, “But
Mom, Video Games Are My Job.” Thus we have the current valuation of many millennials
and those younger about their future prospects.
To make money by playing games.
Any why not? Prize money for E-sports
contests are in the millions. Multiple
millions of the younger set play these games, generating revenues for producers,
often exceeding intake by movie theaters and professional sports.
These days fully 170 colleges offer e-sports competition. It is a mere blink of the sports-clock before
full scholarships for e-sports combatants are offered. Oops, that blink has blinked, and now
multiple colleges are offering scholarships to play such games including Overwatch and League
of Legends.
This new cadre of e-sports semi-pros
is paying real dollars to watch others play the game, naturally hoping to cash
in themselves. One of the biggest games is Fortnite,
a shooter type genre. It has generated $203,000,000 in 2019 from 250,000,00
players worldwide. The company producing it, Epic, has an estimated worth of $15 billion.
What are the prospects for e-sports players making a living? The best projection comes from the companion
sport, P-sports such as football. While
there are about a million kids playing high-school football today, there are only
1700 players in the NFL. This makes the probability of making any real money
for the high school player in the pro leagues is less than 1 in 500 – or about
one in every ten high school teams. The
odds are therefore slim. They are effectively slimmer when considering the
lifetime of a typical pro is only three or four years.
What does the average high school or college football players look
forward to? The many who do not get college football scholarships understand
quickly they must adjust their lives and learn either a skill or other type of
education. Those gaining by the award of
a football scholarship have a different fate.
Excepting multiple surgeries, a diminished education, and a beaten body,
their average gain is not much. They
arrive, still in their twenties, at adulthood with few if any workplace skills,
virtually uneducable, and no habit of learning beyond the “coaching life.” They lived on scholarships from the colleges,
which, exploiting their abilities for the campus, leave them with little for
their lives ahead. Now with the better players already able to market their
abilities and images for profit, the vast majority play on, sometimes hoping
against hope for a pro career.
These stories are well documented, tragic, and so very sad.
Exploited by the high schools and then the colleges, their futures are mortgaged
against their limited, temporal abilities.
It appears the colleges and video game promoters have found new
victims to celebrate themselves for the school or profit. This latest cadre of victims, dedicated gamers,
is rising rapidly. Those spending
hundreds of hours each month learning and practicing video games in the hopes
of making the big time of professionals making real money playing video games.
Their parents of E-sports children understand the futility, as have previous
parents of generations of P-sports youth with the same dreams.
The video producers are unabashed about making profit. The colleges, however, are totally into profit
exploitation at the expense of their own product, their students. What a bunch of great humanitarian educators.
Huh?
The E-sports young adults will likewise enter adulthood, not with
broken bodies, but with few workplace skills, little learning ability, and now
hardly any desire to do anything else.
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