Esports are absolute cultural phenomena. They started modestly years ago and have grown to prominence thanks to the passion of fans who gathered by the millions to support little-known events at the time.
Video games such as StarCraft and Warcraft really laid down the groundwork for much larger competitive events. One of the biggest esports games today, Dota 2, was just a Warcraft 3 Map modification that grew out of relative obscurity and became the world’s highest paid video gaming competition.
When Dota 2 arrived, still a somewhat buggy beta, the game actually had a $1 million prize pool for its first tournament, and that set in motion a sort of esports-craze, which has become a trend. Today, esports is a viable career path, not just in Dota 2 but in many other games as well.
Before you jump on this exciting opportunity, though, you ought to ask yourself if you should really go into esports as a career.
1. Do You Have a Game You Really Love?
To find out if you love a game, you ought to ask yourself – is this something that really makes me happy? You can constantly learn about your favorite esports game or even bet at it at places such as https://dota2-bets.com/. What’s important here is to make sure you feel passionate about a particular game.
This can be StarCraft, Fortnite, or admittedly Dota 2, but as long as you enjoy playing and are decided to improve your own skills in the game, you will see the progress that can open up many career opportunities for you when it comes to esports.
2. Do the Game Offer Good Prize Pools?
It’s one thing to compete in Warcraft 3, where the prize pools are rather small, and a whole other thing to compete in Dota 2, where the pool for the game’s biggest tournament is over $40 million.
While you have to play in a game that you enjoy, it’s also important to consider the viability of your choice. You can play Warcraft 3 for fun, but accept that you would never be able to realistically spend too much time on it, as it’s not financially viable.
Then again, if you go after Dota 2 and show a lot of promise early on, you are very likely to find sufficient opportunities to both the game you enjoy and make a decent living. Many teams are offering salaried positions for promising players today.
3. Are You Prepared to Train Hard?
It’s a video game, and it’s supposed to be fun, and yet, you will need to put in a lot of hard work to make things work. There is certainly an element of joy, but once you decided to go professional, you will have fixed practice times as well as be obliged to take care of yourself.
Many old-time professional gamers, the first to compete on the highest level, were fully committed to video gaming and burnt out quickly. Today, though, the organizations that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries want to make sure you are healthy.
Part of being a professional video gamer means that you will have to conform to fixed practice time as well as maintain a health and training regime. Fixed gaming hours will be there, and you will be obliged to sleep enough, eat healthy, and move enough to make sure that you are delivering your top performance.
4. Do You Do It for the Money?
Many people start as video gamers because they want to bite a juicy chunk out of the final prize pool. While this is an understandable motivation, it’s not always the best one. The most successful players all confirm that they started playing because they loved the game.
This love grew into a passion that allowed them to transcend the average gaming level and become role models. Naturally, not everyone is going to make it to the top tiers, but if your motivation is purely money, you will not have the patience or motivation to really make it to the top.
5. Is There Promise in Your Play?
Now, there are two types of gamers. Some are more leisurely in the way they play and they don’t necessarily play to learn. However, those who show promise do so because they want to perform better.
If you are the latter type, then you will certainly grow and evolve in the way you play video games. You will learn from your mistakes and come up with new solutions to existing players.
Of course, some players are naturally more talented than others. This is okay. Raw talent is hardly important. You may not know anything about a video game nor be very good at it at first, but still end up topping the scores.
6. Make Sure to Develop the Right Mindset
To compete, you will have to possess the right qualities, and a mindset is one of those. You see, you can’t really make it as a professional video gamer unless you have a lot of patience, compassion, and determination.
Many people tend to be impatient and that is what stops them from becoming true professional gamers. You must focus on your own mistakes, for example, and when you are too impatient to admit those, you will often end up looking for an issue in the wrong place, which will stall growth.
7. Remain Consistent to See Improvement
Many players are passionate about a game, but they often give up too early or too easily. You need to remind yourself that success is contingent on how determined you are. You ought to keep going even when it seems hard. Many of the skills you need to pick are automated over time.
What you need to do is to spend enough hours of a conscious effort to make a difference. Do not take a failure as a sentence on your self-worth. Rather, take this in stride as a learning experience and continue – you will eventually “level up” to put it in gaming lingo.
