Life After Game Over: Pro Gamers Face Retirement

Professional gaming, the loose confederacy of leagues, organizations, and tournaments that fall under the large banner of “eSports,” has experienced dizzying growth in the last decade. Once little more than glorified LAN parties with some sponsors and prize money, the popularity of watching the world’s best players compete in games like StarCraft II, League of Legends, and Dota 2 has turned professional gaming into a bona fide industry. But what do pro gamers do when they hang up their controllers?

An influx of corporate sponsorship dollars and a rapidly growing audience that watches live matches online has created a new breed of professional gamers. These young, driven players push their reflexes to the limit for live audiences of thousands and online audiences of millions, raking in money from tournament prizes and endorsement deals. The best can earn a good income living the dream of every kid: doing nothing but playing video games.

But what happens when it’s over? As in traditional sports, the time comes when every player’s career ends. Unlike established sports like football or baseball, there hasn’t been a clear career path for retired pro gamers. Like so much about eSports, ex-players are writing – and rewriting – their own rules, and finding creative ways to stay involved with the game.

[Ryan "Fwiz" Wyatt (right) and Chris Puckett (left) on an MLG broadcast]

The Dream And The Reality

While history tends to focus on the superstars of any given sport, the reality is most of those who pass through the professional eSports ranks don’t achieve the heights of fame or bring home multimillion dollar prize money. Ryan “Fwiz” Wyatt is one of them. Like many young men, he grew up obsessed with gaming, and grew his skill on tactical PC games like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike.

At the age of 14, he began playing Counter-Strike competitively well enough to have some success in tournaments, but even by his own admission he wasn’t a major factor in the scene. “[With] Counter-Strike, I never played at a high enough level to earn any serious income,” he says.

In 2008, Wyatt moved over to playing Activision’s Call of Duty and continued to have some success as a competitor. However, even as Call of Duty was becoming the world’s most popular franchise, the eSports scene around it was in its infancy. “When I got involved with Call of Duty the space was so new,” he says. “We were competing, but for bragging rights with no economic structure in place. You could win these small-prize tournaments of $250. It was difficult to make any kind of legitimate income playing Call of Duty at that time.”

Still, Wyatt loved the world of eSports and knew it was destined to grow. And, for a college student at Ohio State, it had its benefits. “It was beer money,” Wyatt recalls.

Wyatt eventually earned a spot on the up-and-coming OpTic Gaming Call of Duty team, and later served as a coach during the team’s rise to prominence. As he approached the end of his four years at Ohio State, Wyatt began to realize that a long-term pro gaming career was probably not in the cards, but he knew eSports had a bright future and wanted to stay involved. It brought him to a decision point that – sooner or later – all professional gamers face. What should you do when you hang it up?

Sean "Day9" Plott

The Accidental Pros

Speaking with professional gamers about their careers, you begin to notice a pattern – most of them never expected to have a career to begin with. With a few exceptions, the circuit of professional gaming tournaments wasn’t large enough to support more than a handful of players worldwide until recent years.

Dennis “Thresh” Fong was one of the earliest stars of the emerging competitive gaming circuit, specializing in then-popular shooters like Doom II and Quake. He’s considered by many to be the first professional gamer, and says he earned over $100,000 annually in prize and sponsorship money during his peak years.

“Back in the day with my brothers, we grew up with computers, and we used to play on LAN at home,” Fong says. “My dad worked for HP, so we had five computers. I didn’t realize that I was that special.” Fong later ended qualifying for a Microsoft tournament for Doom II through an early, dial-up online multiplayer service called DWANGO, and won $15,000 – a huge prize for those days.

The American scene continued to grow throughout the ‘90s, largely focused on deathmatch competitions in the popular first-person shooters of the day and a handful of 2D fighting games like Capcom’s Street Fighter II. However, the current worldwide appeal of competitive gaming is an outgrowth of the South Korean professional StarCraft scene. Starting in the early 2000s, the massive popularity of StarCraft and its offshoot Brood War brought in corporate sponsorships and 24-hour television coverage that helped establish a much more organized scene than the disparate American circuit of tournaments and competing leagues.

The organization and large-scale tournament structure spurred on by the Korean pro gaming phenomenon started to have an impact on kids in the West. Sean Plott (aka Day[9]) recalls the early StarCraft scene being largely social, a way for him and his brother to meet other fans in online communities centered on forums and message boards.

“Getting into the competitive scene was very much a social thing,” Plott says. “StarCraft was immensely popular. When one person in the community learned about a big tournament, he’d spread the word, and everyone would begin training for that. It [wasn’t] about glory or money, because there wasn’t an established way to get into it as a profession.” Eventually, the emergence of large-scale tournaments began to breed a more structured professional gaming industry in the West. Organizations like Major League Gaming and World Cyber Games and its Pan-American Championships provided a path forward for many aspiring American pros. Plott says, “It was a clear structure – anyone could wrap their head around how you won your qualifier, your national event, and how that led to the international event.”

A New Generation

This rapid expansion of a worldwide eSports infrastructure means we are now seeing the first crop of professional gamers who have come up through the ranks with the assumption that eSports could be a viable source of income.

“It changed so drastically,” Wyatt says. “[Before] it was only a net positive return if you placed top four with all the travel expenses. Now, a lot of sponsors are covering travel and hotel costs.”

Michael Chavez, a Halo player now training for a comeback at the ripe old age of 24, is one of this new wave of players. Unlike the older generation, who had never dreamed of making a living, he was actually drawn to the sport through the promise of big money prizes.

“I played Halo 2 and I heard about a competition called MLG,” Chavez says. “I didn’t know what it was, but I heard that people were making six figures from professional gaming. I liked video games, and I wanted to take a stab at this six-figure salary that people were making.”

“The majority of players are assigned to teams or a personal sponsor,” says Rod “Slasher” Breslau, who is GameSpot’s eSports reporter and co-host of the eSports web show Live On Three. “In the West, teams had been created kind of like football clubs, where it’s just a guy with a bunch of money. Evil Geniuses are the biggest Western team in the world. They started from just a Counter-Strike team and guy named Alex Garfield who was an enthusiast. Now, it’s grown into a multimillion dollar business; he has teams in Dota, League of Legends, StarCraft II, World of Warcraft, Quake, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, etc.... Salaries are never reported to the public, but top-tier guys in the West can make $80,000 or $90,000 a year on base salary. A lot of guys make $20,000 to $40,000 yearly.”

Breslau estimates that between 100 and 200 professional gamers worldwide earn enough through team salaries, prize money, and endorsements to support themselves by gaming and practicing full-time. Thanks to the increased visibility of tournaments (now able to be broadcast online to audiences of millions), professional gaming has spawned a new class of electronic athletes with legions of fans just like their counterparts in traditional sports.

This new generation of professional gamers better understand how to market themselves, and have made eSports a largely personality driven industry. “In traditional sports, you often find regional loyalties,” Wyatt says. “I’m from Cleveland, so unfortunately I’m a Cleveland Browns fan. With eSports teams, you don’t have that kind of allegiance. So you end up attaching yourself more to players because you find them relatable – ‘I like this guy when I watch him stream and he reminds me of someone I want to be friends with.’”

One of America’s most successful teams, OpTic Gaming, has created both individual stars like Matthew “NaDeSHoT” Haag (who currently has 585,000 Twitter followers) and a strong team brand. Though its been successful in competition (the team won first place and $400,000 at the first Call of Duty $1 million championship in 2011), OpTic actually makes most of its money through streaming on YouTube and the official MLG site.

Team owner and founder Hector Rodriguez says this was by design. “We had established ourselves as a premier Call of Duty entertainment organization by providing video content for our fans,” he says. “I decided to go back and do competitive gaming for Call of Duty...I went after somebody I thought was going to be good at being put on camera, and [NaDeSHoT] was this guy. For a whole year I sat down with him and we went over things that could work and better ways to grow his brand to a level so that he could be a YouTube star. He has become one of the biggest personalities in eSports.”

The Life

With money, fame, and the accolades that come with professional eSports competition, it’s not hard to see its appeal for a young person raised on video games. However, the realities of maintaining a top-level professional gaming career are more daunting than you might expect.

Johnathan Wendel, who became one of the world’s most famous Quake III Arena players under the name Fatal1ty in the early 2000s, described his regimen prior to a competition. “You’re talking eight, fourteen, sixteen hours a day,” he says. “And then also working out and being physically fit. I do a lot of stuff to be energetic and making sure my reflexes are good.”

For Plott, who began competing while still attending college full-time, the challenges were even greater. “I was just doing the usual college thing; attending classes and spending five to six hours a day training StarCraft” he says. “I actually used to get up very early in the morning, around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., to train with Korean players up until breakfast, then I’d begin a normal day for a college student.”

Throw in the stresses of live competition, often broadcast to millions, and the demands of traveling to events, and you’ve got a lifestyle that’s every bit as pressure-packed as that of any other professional athlete or entertainer – and one where much of your income must be fought for on a monthly basis through play.

Some of the more successful teams, like OpTic, live together in one “team house” to cultivate the highly refined skill and coordination required to be a successful team. As with any house filled with young men in their late teens and early 20s, it’s a spartan and raucous existence.

“We started out in a house that had almost no furniture – all it had was the desks the guys play on and the office chairs,” Rodriguez says. “They all have air mattresses, they haven’t even bothered to go buy regular beds. All they do every day is work on their craft, which is helping their careers. Whether it is practicing eight hours a day and recording or entertaining live, that’s what they do. Everything is a competition: who drinks their nutrition shakes quicker, etc. We’ve had fights happen. There’s always going to be a clash of who’s the best or who’s more popular.”

While the grind is excessive, all the current and ex-pros I spoke to felt it was a necessary part of pursuing a career in professional gaming. “If you’re trying to compete at anything – sports, gaming – at the upper one percent, it requires an incredible amount of time,” Wyatt says. “To be the best at what you do in anything in life requires you to put more time in than the next guy. You see these guys streaming on MLG.com and they are putting in nine or ten hours a day. That’s no different than it was six or seven years ago. Six to eight hours a day is required to stay on top of your game.”

However, the relentless pace does come at a price that seems to escalate as the player moves through his 20s. Whether its lost career opportunities, declining skills, neglected relationships, or sheer burnout, pro gamers seem to drift away from competitive play as they approach 30.

David "Walshy" Walsh

 The End Of The Line

As in any competitive endeavor, a time comes when all players finally put down the mouse and keyboard for good. For many, this time occurs at a point in life when many of their contemporaries have just emerged from college and are beginning down their own career paths.

Having never made a sustaining income from competition, Wyatt knew his time was soon up. “Had I been 16 at the time doing it, it would have been completely different,” he says. “Being 22, I thought, ‘I have to make a move here.’ Something had to happen sooner rather than later.”  

He eventually pivoted from competing in Call of Duty to running the online tournaments and refereeing events. “I looked at this as an opportunity to get some groundwork in the space to set up for a career,” he says.

According to GameSpot’s Rod Breslau, this is a dilemma most professional gamers will face as they age. “Mid-to-late twenties has been the general cap for players to stop playing,” he says. “Player skill, as you do get older, it does deteriorate a good bit from when you were 15 or 16. I don’t know when exactly it is, but sometime around 24 to 26, it is noticeable. You don’t have the same APM – actions per minute – on a keyboard. You don’t have the same mechanics and speed as you once did when you were younger. A lot of players have to adapt in terms of strategy.”

When I covered Blizzard’s unveiling of StarCraft II at the 2007 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, some of the Korean pro gamers, no older than their very early 20s at the time, expressed similar sentiments about their declining skills in relation to the up-and-coming crop of teenage players. However, other former pros scoff at the notion, like Johnathan Wendel.

When asked, Wendel responded, “I don’t know. It’s not like we’re playing a professional sport” he says. “It’s not like we’re running around and our ankles are giving out. You look at the top pitchers in the world or top quarterbacks, they’re playing into their thirties. They’re playing in a really tough environment. So knowledge and experience is going to trump a lot of the reflexes. I was 26, certain sponsors were out there saying, ‘Fatal1ty’s a dinosaur. He won’t ever win again.’ – all this stuff. And then I went on to win the most money ever in gaming history.”

David “Walshy” Walsh, who was one of the world’s best competitive Halo players, agrees. “I still believe, had I put time in and enjoyed the game, I would be on top,” he says. “It might just be because I’m cocky, but I still believe. These up-and-coming kids are phenomenal, but I don’t think it had anything to do with losing my reflexes.”

In eSports, where careers can often begin in a player’s mid-teens and demand a huge investment of time, a period of re-assessment often occurs. “I don’t miss that feeling of sacrificing everything,” Plott says. “When there was a big tournament that I cared about I’d be practicing eight or nine hours a day and get my schoolwork done [while] trying to stay focused and not lose social connections. Then, I go to a tournament and make a dumb mistake and get eliminated. You’re sitting there thinking back on these four months and you say, ‘I am such a failure.’ I think every pro gamer has had that.”

Hector "OpticH3CZ" Rodriguez

“You get to a certain age and girlfriends come into play,” Rodriguez says. “Yeah, it’s cool that you’re gaming and living in this house with your gaming frat buddies, and you have air mattresses – but what about her? As a girlfriend, she’s not going to be okay living in a place with no furniture and a mattress.”

For others, changes in the professional circuit and the marketplace force a change. Unlike football or baseball, which are essentially unchanging through the years, the competitive gaming audiences’ taste are constantly evolving, often leaving behind once-dominant games. The early days of professional gaming in the U.S. was ruled by the popular shooters, most descended from id Software’s seminal Doom. However, in the last decade, shooters have lost ground to the runaway success of StarCraft as well as the meteoric rise of MOBAs like Dota 2 and League of Legends, which now are two of the biggest games on the circuit. Halo, once the dominant shooter in the U.S., lost popularity as a result of unwelcome changes in Halo: Reach and has been supplanted by Call of Duty. As the popularity of a game decreases, so do cash prizes at tournaments and the sponsorship dollars available to players who specialize in those games.

For Johnathan Wendel, who dominated the U.S. shooter scene in the early 2000s, these economic realities were a big part of his decision to step away. “The sponsorship money starts going away and all of those possibilities go away,” Wendel says. “Today in professional gaming, the money is all in MOBA games...

I would play all day every day and train my lights out if I had a professional contract like an NFL player. You give me a serious contract, I will perform for you. If I’m competing for $10,000 to $15,000 a year in a game that’s dying or already dead, there’s zero motivation there. What’s the point of winning more tournaments? This is from my point of view. I feel like I’ve already done it all in eSports.” 

Making The Transition

After a player decides to step away from his competitive career, he or she faces the question that all pro athletes eventually confront: What now? Many of the top players have found ways to stay in and around the scene long after their playing days.

The most commonplace way that top ex-pros earn a living is livestream “casting” or doing commentary at live events. Along with personalities like Artosis and Tasteless, Day[9] has become one of the web’s most successful StarCraft II casters, doing both commentary of competitions and instructional videos that teach StarCraft strategy on his YouTube channel.

“I think there are a lot of options,” Wyatt says. “I would tell [pro players], ‘If you’re going down this route as an entertainer or player, you should start building out your YouTube presence and building out our social presence and monetize your ability to play.’ NaDeSHoT has built out a social presence that will allow him to segue into being a content creator and entertainer when he quits competing. He’s amassed a big enough following that he can continue to play video games or go do something different. But they’ve got to build out a skill set that can help them in the real world.”

This strategy has paid off well for Wyatt. He established himself early on in the rise of Call of Duty as an eSports game, and has had a hand in organizing, refereeing, producing, and broadcasting live competitions for companies like Major League Gaming and Machinima. Recently, he left Machinima to return to Major League Gaming as vice president of programming – all at an age when many of his contemporaries are still emerging on to the post-college job market.

Sean Plott echoes these sentiments. “When StarCraft II came out, I began to try my chops at analyzing that, because I had 10 years of mental tools from playing StarCraft that I could apply to StarCraft II,” he says. “Then, all these tournaments began to spring up; the first one I went to was the Intel Extreme Masters in Gamecom, and then BlizzCon was having their event. Since I had been doing my own show five days a week, the tournament organizers said, ‘Let’s invite him to do commentary at our event.’ It was the first time I started thinking, ‘You know what? This could actually be a career. This could be the thing I do all day when I’m done with grad school.’”

Along with the income from his YouTube channel, Plott has a consulting business that helps organize events and produce video content. He’s also joined forces with Artillery Games to help create a browser-based RTS game currently being developed under the codename Project Atlas.

The insight and knowledge of a game and its community that comes with playing at the highest level makes ex-professional gamers a valuable talent in the industry. In addition to Wyatt and Plott, League of Legends has hired ex-pros Jatt and Kobe24 as official casters and David “Phreak” Turley as its community manager. Capcom tapped tournament player Peter “Combofiend” Rosas to replace its departing community manager, Seth Killian. Michael Chavez has put his gaming skills to work doing strategy guides on games like Halo 4 and Titanfall for Prima Games.

Johnathan Wendel and Dennis Fong, benefitting from being part of a less-crowded era in pro gaming, were both able to parlay their fame into lucrative business opportunities. Wendel has partnered with companies like Creative Labs and ASRock to create a line of Fatal1ty branded gaming products, from headsets to PC motherboards. “In 2002, I said, ‘[Sponsors are] not showing me any commitment. I’m going to go out and create my own product.‘”

Fong, seeing firsthand the power of Internet connected gaming, founded industry-related technology companies like Gamers.com, Xfire, and the social network Raptr, where he serves as CEO.

David Walsh has tried his hand at a number of endeavors, including commentating for Major League Gaming, a clothing line called Kiaenato that he’s no longer associated with, a charity organization he co-founded, and his work with the Electronic Consumers Association. He’s currently enrolled Grand Valley State University in Pennsylvania studying computer science. “I want to learn how to program and go into game design,” he says. “I hopefully want to do multiplayer balance on a top eSports title like Call of Duty or Halo.”

Still, you don’t have to talk to any of them too long before you get a hint of the competitive fire that drove them to the top of professional gaming. When I ask Sean Plott if he missed competitive gaming, he says, “All day, everyday. There’s no feeling that replaces the joy of trying to push yourself hard and trying to win. I’m making it sound more bittersweet than it actually is. Yes, I miss it, but I can play a game with my brother and it’s just as fun.”

“I don’t really think any professional gamer ever really retires,” Wendel says. “If they were offering salaries like a baseball player where you have five or six-year contracts that are seven figures, there’d be no reason to quit.”

But for now, former pros like Wyatt are finding that staying involved with eSports in other ways is a fulfilling – and lucrative – alternative.”