Can Cash Prize Buy Your Esports Event or Game Success?
By: Nicolas Cerrato
Tags: Esports, Gaming, Analysis

THE PAINKILLER & DOTA 2 EXAMPLES

The first big obvious example of cash prize failing at building success for an esports game and community dates back to 2005 when the Dallas-based Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), then the Western leader in esports events production, and Dreamcatcher, publisher of then-new 1v1 FPS game Painkiller, put $1M on the line in a worldwide Painkiller pro circuit.

Fast-forward to 2016 when EA announced $1.3M cash prize for the FIFA 2017 esports season and it sounded pretty big: you can only imagine how huge a $1M cash prize sounded for a new game franchise in 2005. There was a roar in the esports community.

But when the 1st tournaments came in, disappointment started to show up: there weren’t many registered players, even with 1M on the line. And there weren’t armies of fans cheering for them. There wasn’t a lively community burgeonning online either.

What this 1M cash prize actually did is that it had a handful of pro Quake and Unreal Tournament players, let’s say 200 as we want to sound optimistic, the most talented in the world, thinking they had a shot at a descent amount of money in this new game that looked a lot like their favorite one.

Everyone else below their level, that’s 99,9999% of the potential player base, thought: “Oh I’ll never stand a chance anyway”. In the end, the $1M resulted in 200 people having a lot of fun for one year but pretty much no one else burning with passion for the game or pro circuit.

The big money also did attract the attention of the media world and allowed a few PR stunts such as the season finals, which had Dutch-phenom Vo0 facing American superstar Fatal1ty, live broadcast on an MTV channel, as you can see below.

Here I’d like to point out it’s possible that this PR work generated through cash prize helped sales of the game for a few weeks, maybe to a point that they generated significant revenue even. I don’t have numbers unfortunately.

The positive effect of a big cash prize on press relations could also be observed in an even more spectacular way when the crowdfunded cash prize for DotA 2’s The International reached $18M in 2015. This number got all the biggest, most mainstream media you could think of, super excited about TI’s cash prize and esports in general. They wanted to consider the huge number as proof that esports now do mean something in our culture and society, something that can be compared to the pro Golf scene for example… and that’s what they told everyone. Kudos.

So it has to be stressed that in TI’s case too, the cash prize did generate a lot of exposure for esports in general and DotA 2 even more.

But in terms of building a community, DotA 2’s active players numbers have not boomed following the huge exposure the game received. They have kept growing steadily, as they’ve had before, but there was no bump in active users matching the huge PR burst.

Going back to 2005, in terms of community building, what Dreamcatcher got out of spending $1M in cash prize is roughly 200 pro players deeply involved for one year (but not longer: they came for the money, so when the money’s out…) and that’s about it.

At the rate of 200 active players for $1M, how much would it have cost Riot Games to recruit 100M active players for League of Legends?

$500 000 000 000. And remember that’s for one year of being involved in the game.

Since the Painkiller days, many a gaming marketer willing to crack esports has learned this lesson the hard way. It is somewhat convenient to think cash prize can buy a game a seat in the very private club of succesful esports games. It just doesn’t work that way.

Actually, considering DotA 2’s $18M prize pool in 2015 was paid for the most part through crowdsourcing, one should strongly consider the following rule of thumb: in esports, community precedes cash prize. Not the contrary.