Investing in eSports?

Sup OP.
So, I work in esports (sponsor acquisition for independent players, broker signings to teams, formerly worked at a decently sized sponsor, occasional tournament logistics staff, content production for teams), and I'm here to tell you: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

esports is hella top heavy. Unless you own a high performing team, you're making jack shit, and you'll likely be losing money at times. Even when you have a decently performing team, the required time investment is so high that the $/hr is shit tier, honestly.

If you don't have enough money to buy a team, you have a few options:
1. Invest in the scene itself (providers, sponsors, producers)
2. Start a team and hope for the best
3. If you have decent capital, look into starting an ownership group for a team.

I'll break these down below. But as a general warning, just don't do it unless you really enjoy the work. It's long hours, weird time zones, lots of stress, all for a pretty small return. From freelancing to full time work, I could have made far more money in traditional industries doing the same jobs.
In addition, investing in esports is also really janky due to the life cycle of games. In 2012, you would have been looking to invest in SC2. In 2013, LoL. In 2014, Dota. In 2015-present, CS is the way to go. Now we're seeing some big gambles on OW (and there are more to come). There is a large chunk of it that's a guessing game.

>the next games will be guild based
Whoa now, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Anything with a 40 man team is extremely bandwidth/netcode limited and it would constantly get shit on by games with more surgical netcode.

>Investing in the scene
esports is a minor player in the gaming sector as a whole, but it is growing. The pleb tier esports investor is better off just putting their money into ATVI, AMD, INTC, 0700 (Tencent), AMZN, etc. etc. Tencent trades on HKG, so you would need to ensure your broker offers access to it. These buys will let you profit off the marginal income that esports generates for these companies, even though it's pennies compared to their core businesses. The success of a game as an esport doesn't seem to have a major impact on the game's overall success, as the fanbase is such a minor part of the overall playerbase, and an even smaller part of the gaming audience as a whole. Even Twitch represents a relatively fractional part of Amazon's balance sheet. This is your play if you truly believe in the long term growth of esports and the ability for the parent companies to profit off of it to the same scale as traditional sports.

>Start a team
This is how you'll have a shot at making some real esports skrilla. Except you probably won't. You're going to have to take a loss at first, putting up cash to sign unsponsored players or rosters to your new org. Unless you have a serious bank account, you'll most likely only be offering equipment and salary, no travel support, especially if it's a team game. You need at least a few decent results before you can actually talk to sponsors worthwhile. But even then, they won't be giving you much. All the low tier teams that you see with Razer and G2A sponsorships? Yeah, those are just free gear + referral links. We're talking non existent or minimal cash flow.
This is actually where you can start to be a real businessman though. Smaller gear companies, smaller "geek" brands are willing to pay for low tier teams. It's going to be shit pay, but it's a cash flow. Fighting game players are some of your best bets because of this. They tend not to ask for much and there are plenty of stick/pad makers that will pay. Look into brands that are currently in the scene and then approach their competitors. Shit's fun.
Sadly OP, you won't make much off of this. Let's assume that you even manage to get a player with CPT points, a CS team that gets in ESEA Premier, maybe even a Starcraft player who gets top 32 at DH. You're looking at $300/m salaries for these players. Your sponsorships might total a few grand a year. Your first year of profit will likely be at maybe $2500.
Weigh all of this against the thousands of hours you put into contract negotiation, booking flights, coordinating with sponsors, managing social media, working on sponsor decks and negotiating with prospects, doing scouting research for new players, etc. etc.
Unless you're Alex Garfield and tap a huge new sponsor market, Regi Dinh and brand the top team in a new hot game, or Nazgul and have literally perfect market timing, you won't make significant money. D:

>Ownership Group
This one is actually really exciting because it's finally starting to crop up. If you have a decent bankroll to throw around ($60-75K minimum), find 9 of your best friends and start an ownership group. From here, you have two options. Either buy out a previously existing organization and simply assume control or you can start a new org. Starting a new team will be easier, because with your combined bankrolls, you can actually afford non-shit tier players/teams. You're going to be able to pick up CS Minor teams, top 20 CPT players, top 8 DH Starcraft, maybe even a Dota Major qual team. If you go the LoL route, you're going to cough up half a mil for a Challenger slot, probably another quarter mil for the team to fill it.
You'll be able to get big money sponsors, as well as have the ability to pull in new, big sponsors. That said, it will take time to see profit. Running a major scale team takes a staff and those cost money. You're going to be splitting 10 ways now, so it's going to be minimal income, maybe $8K a year, after management salaries are paid. Tbh, the instagram pics alone are worth it tho, hoes love globe travelers. Also Shaq selfies.

TL;DR - Don't fuckin do it

>no one talking about heroes of the storm

Before you get into that many specifics when you're talking about a potential investment start with identifying a revenue stream.

Let's be honest - most gamers are broke NEETs; generally speaking.

Major competition/team sponsors are only on board to sell product to their target audience (Nvidia, AMD, others misc computer hardware companies). Since that's not you I'm not sure what you would profit from.

Sponsor a team with the hopes they'll 'make it'? Even if they do.. by the time you factor all of the money you'd have put into getting them gear, possibly flying them to events, promotion etc. you'd probably make a really small profit.

Toss in a kid that's not good at hiding his cheats and your teams reputation can be destroyed the blink of an eye.

Not worth it senpai. No real money to be made there unless you're shilling computer hardware/software.

This was super interesting and informative. I'm glad I came back to check on this thread. Thanks a lot for the info senpai

No problem! I really love what I do, but I've seen plenty of people get sucked in and lose thousands trying to profit off of the upswing. It's a tough, competitive world, with narrow profit margins until you hit the absolute top. The days of the Wild Wild West are over. D:
Glad you enjoyed. I'll probably post more info the next time this issue comes up.

Hey, man, what about just starting a Twitch channel and try to scam people into giving you donations?

>I'm a guy
>I want to play my favorite RPG games and maybe new Unreal Tournament + CS:GO
>My voice is fine, but I don't have a cam

Will I make it? And how much time should I invest in this bullshit scheme?

Only Blizzard cucks play HOTS

there was a guy who was scamming twitch pretending to be handicapped and in a wheelchair, one day he just stood up on camera thinking it was off.

twitch banned him and refunded all of his viewers their subscriptions.

FWTW this one guy in a Hearthstone game named Reynad always said he'd love to buy a LoL team but it would be too expensive and this is a guy who owns a popular website and can easily pull down 5k in a night if he does text to speech.

I would suggest you try to grow a Overwatch team or Hearthstone has a lot of random players with no team who'd probably join for just flights and a place to live.

Also OP, if you could make a Bad Boys team I'd love to see that, just tell them they get extra cash for getting into internet trouble, wearing sunglasses and saying deal with it after a win, or remembering a script where they taunt their foes with WWE style smack talk, you'd be everyones hero if you get really slick and creative with it.

People always cling to the fragmented and heavily modified "success" stories when it comes to starting a business. The stories you really want to hear are the failures. Chances are you won't find them because people don't like writing about the downsides, they don't like telling the tale of their failure, and truthfully people don't eat the bad up like the polished good. But you learn more about starting a business from the fallen than the risen. As one user points out there is a lot of story between the line that you didn't catch because you are too invested in the day dream of making millions for playing a video game.
As others have said eSports is niche as fuck, everyone looking to bleed money out of it are already at the table and for anyone new to get in and not fail would be sheer luck.
But if you still feel that you can at least get in some way some how then by all means try, just don't expect it to end like the guy in the article.

Sry, I should clarify: scam - as in literally siphon money from people that will watch me play.

Kind of like every girl does on Twitch.

So, nothing illegal, famalam, I'm just thinking whether a guy can pull out something like that.

Hire a Dota 2 team and make them win "The international"
last years price pool was 18million, dont remember how much of that the winners took

Cant be too hard to lure 5 chinamen into playing dota all day if you promise them "On the house" threesomes and a million dollars when they win

Cohh carnage is sitting on twitch making money while playing through all games known to man

Theres even some fat swedish guy doing minecraft "pixel art" while wearing a cyborg mask and making wolf kind of noises
That is, when his not busy being poltical correct and giving people with no life and or friends advice on how to live their life

>You're looking at $300/m salaries for these players.
that can't be $300 a month? a top 32 starcraft player only costs $3600 a year? how does that make sense?

Ive seen people make a hundred bucks a day with only a few hundred followers.

If you can be entertaining (not boring) you have a shot. Just engage with your stream and do some givaways and try to play with your paid subs and all that..

I've been thinking about trying to do this, but I still live with my dad (im 22 saving money) and dont want to show my autismo levels quite yet. If I lived at home I would be all over that shit.

it doesn't!

>If you can be entertaining (not boring) you have a shot.
yeah but most players are boring or average, and i don't think the op is anything but that

To everyone saying esports is a dying fad or that OP is too late to the game: EVO started in 1996 and continues to grow year after year. Teams have been playing counterstrike for 15+ years. Each CS major has more viewers and more money in it than the previous. Esports is not going anywhere.

Top 32 Dreamhack (16th-32). We aren't talking about Korean talent.
It's not that he's too late to the game. He's too late to get into the high profit part of the game unless he has a large starting bankroll.
Also, fighting games have historically bad RoI.

>eSports
literally laughed out loud