10.9 Million Dollar Prize Pool

As I continue with the trend of video games for this blog, one aspect to look at is the professional side of video games in popular culture. I will begin by talking about the rise of tournaments from players trying to obtain top scores to tournaments last year which had millions of dollars in prize money. So according to Kotaku, the first known video game tournament was held at Stanford University. This tournament featured the game SpaceWar, with the first place prize being a year subscription to Rolling Stones....  (no consolation prize for second place either, though there was free beer).You can read more about it here. Also here is a picture of the game which is played on a outdated piece of technology:

 For your information, a yearly subscription of Rolling Stones in today's monetary value is $29.95 according to Amazon. That isn't too bad considering that back then there weren't digital publication of magazines and people actually read physical magazines. Still even if you were to move the time value of money on that 1970's subscription of the Rolling Stones to today it wouldn't be that much. Prize pool in video games is a way to tell just how much the growth of professional video games have grown in recent years.

Now fast forward 42 years to 2014. I've mentioned before about the game League of Legends. You might be asking why i am bringing up this game. The reason i bring up this game is because of the prize pool which was 2.1 million dollars. Lets recap what we have so far. 1972, winner gets 12 issues of a magazine worth 30$. 2014,first place in League of Legends Esports video game tournament gets 1,000,000 dollars which is equivalent to 3333 subscriptions of Rolling Stone Magazine. Quite the leap, but that isn't even the jest of things. Yes of course with prize money there is going to be a tax on it, 40%-50%, but still even with a split of 1,000,000$ which will be split four ways, each person is going to be walking home with a 100,000$+. The funny thing is, this isn't even the largest prize pool for a video game tournament in esports history. That record belongs to the International Dota 2 event of 2014. This tournament had a prize pool of 10.9 million dollars (the Compedium is a fancy name for the championships of Dota 2)!!! First place received a grand prize of 5.6 million dollars. Millionaires were literally made during the grand final day. An interesting thing to note about this is that the part of the tournament was funded by the Dota 2 community. An innovative feature for fans of the series was the use of Compendium, which allowed fans of the series to purchase special prizes with a portion of the money contributing to the overall prize pool of the Dota 2 tournament. The benefits of this increase is the benefit reward strategy of being able to actively contribute to a company that you support while reaping in the added benefits of in game items. League of Legends has commented about this idea saying that "they were not concerned from a business perspective because they want to keep the prize pool at a amount that has the opportunity to grow over the years. This point of view is respectable in the sense that they don't want to alienate their fan-base by having down years which could apply if the community didn't contribute high amounts each year. The competition between these two games to of "whose prize pool" is good for everyone. It brings competition and driving forces into an already growing industry.

Essentially what I am trying to get out of this is the idea that the community itself is one of the main factors of why the video game industry is so successful. The gaming industry is one of the few industries which allow its fans to make an impact on the overall success. Free to Play, another recent strategy allowing people to "purchase" the game for free. I am sort of rambling at this point but this point is definitely not one to overlook in the future. The argument of whether to offer a game at a retail price or allow for people to purchase it for free will have an effect on whether the game will be successful in the future. Adios.