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The Lucky Ones
 

Hey guys,

Having had to skip a week due to moving apartments and missed my usual article day of Friday, I've posted up an article this afternoon, dealing primarily with sponsorships and real sports vs e-sports. Have a read, and if you really want to help me out give me some feedback or discussion points. Also, retweeting really helps me out, as does upvoting and commenting on reddit. This article deals with the Australian sporting / e-sports scenes primarily, so my international viewership probably won't be as high, so everything that you guys can do to help spread the blog around I really appreciate. The more people read it and give me feedback, the better quality the articles are for you guys to consume. It's for you guys, not me!

Here's an excerpt:

"I've met a lot of gamers in my time in 'e-sports'. Some are in it for fun, a weekend hobby, a place to flex their competitive muscle. Others have this distinct glint in their eye. It's a shiny, wondrous speckle of hope that one day e-sports will sit next to real sports as a legitimate form of competition. An entertainment to be celebrated by the masses. It's likely they've grown up following real sports, supporting a team and baring witness to professional players in a stadium, enclosed by the sights and sounds of an audience tens of thousands strong. While we've seen similar spectacles in e-sports around the world for the better half of the last decade, our corner of the world has yet to come to fruition. In our small sphere, we're incredibly lucky to have a fistful of dedicated sponsors that are fueling our still strapping, young dream. It's important to recognise these companies as legitimate investors that are using their profits to inject money into their own prospective markets and work in direct contact with the people who are building that market from the ground up.

If we take rugby league and look under the surface, we can see that these teams have more money than they can spend. Inherent to the game is a market for players, in which teams will make bids for certain stars that will either win games or sell tickets. The scheme isn't as fleshed out or as open as systems in the States for basketball and baseball, but it's still very competitive. So much so that salary caps are placed on clubs to limit the amount of money paid to particular players in order to keep things humble and fair. With the pockets of sponsors and investors so deep that these restrictions are necessary, it's easy to understand how far e-sports has to go to be considered legitimate in Australia. With our small but powerful group of reliable sponsors, perhaps it's not critical to compare ourselves to these sports. Taking a look at the ethos of marketing within our scene and that of the nationally recognised can reveal that while we share the word, we aren't built the same."




Read the whole thing here: http://shitsundersays.blogspot.com.a...ucky-ones.html

Follow me on twitter, where you can easily find my tweets about the article to re-tweet!
https://twitter.com/iM_SundeR

Reddit posts for upvotes/comments:
http://www.reddit.com/r/esports/comm...ip_esports_vs/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/commen...ps_esports_vs/