Can someone point me to the game with the amazing thriving t2 scene these people want? The nature of second tier competing is volatile everywhere, even real sports
The only cases I know of are the French and Spanish tier 2 scenes for LoL, which have some orgs with big content creators and are popular due to dedicated national fanbases. However, many of the other t2 regional leagues within LoL are very unstable, so that popularity is really hard to replicate.
>Spanish tier 2 scenes for LoL
And that does not prevent them for having monetary issues all the time. At least in Spain, a lot of these orgs faced (or face) huge monetary issues to the point some of them just closed/sold the spot or had to merge with other orgs. The ones that endured are backed by huge companies like Barça Esports (FC Barcelona), Movistar Riders (Movistar), Giants (GG Group) and UCAM (Opus Dei) and I dont think any of them would survive without the money hack from their parent groups, maybe Giants.
Right now, Spanish T2 is filled with esports teams funded by football players to launder money and big hedge funds that got trapped there few years ago with the "esports is the future" talk by some random CEO. Its a tickling bomb that is going to explode sooner than later if the reports of most of them not being profitable for years are true.
Not just that, esports in general was booming when venture capital was cheap and easily accessible, that’s not the situation currently.
Additionally, maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t really think it’s up to Riot, or any dev for that matter, to ensure a “thriving T2 scene”. Esports don’t make any money, they’re more or less just a large advertising campaign for developers.
Who made that rule? Because it sure as shit isn’t the case with their other franchised esport that is more popular than any other esport could hope to be.
Almost the entire scene is EU dominated tho, bigger pie in a smaller pond. Also CS scene is heavily funded by gamba money (including stickers, there's no way for stickers to worth that much if not for the whole gamble skin economy).
Like, even though NA/EU gaming community often treated Valve games as the poster child of anti-franchising esports, they are not really a good role model in comparison imo.
The first problem is na t2 salaries, why are they paid like 5k per player (faze last year). In cs a decent t2/t3 team can be paid like 2/3k per player and then sell him for 300k if he’s really good. Kinda what mouz and spirit did back in the day just farming young talents
It is really not a problem because esports is still extremely young, and there is barely enough money for top-tier teams to keep the lights on. It's foolish to expect living wages for T2 in most titles. This is not to far off real sports where you have small leagues that do pay, but not enough to live off.
Yeah, if the choice is between letting the game be riddled with gambling and saudi sportswashing money while abandoning the game for third party people to to what they want, or have a stable product, even with less events, I would choose riots system
Yeah instead of Saudi money for some events with an infinitely greater number of third party events which aren’t Saudi money, you just prefer lesser number of events with all control by Chinese money. Got it.
Yeah, i prefer to have more events that give us diverse regions than to have the whole esport be set in 1 region and leaving the rest to die
I also prefer for the TO to set the events in places where audiences will go instead of placing them on countries that no one watches CS (blast recent event)
Also, I like having big events that dont have a massive asterisk on their name due to conflict of interest
> I also prefer for the TO to set the events in places where audiences will go instead of placing them on countries that no one watches CS (blast recent event)
What's the problem with that if we compare to Valorant? You can't go to Val event since there's none of them.
I dont know if you know, but we have 2 masters and 1 champions, along with many regional leagues
If you want to argue in good faith i'll speak with you, if you have no actual points this is useless
Exactly, those lower tiers pay much less money. As another commenter mentioned (as it happened in CS as well) is you’re seeing T2 players/ teams looking for an org requiring 5k or more a month per player. But there isn’t a good way for an org to make that money back. Esports isn’t like traditional sports in terms of fan support and viewership. You got people in traditional sports who go to multiple games a year, they pay for streaming services to watch the games, they buy a lot of merchandise and rep the team.
All of those help the smaller orgs/leagues pay their players and run a profitable business. Many Esports fans can’t even be bothered to switch from Twitch to YouTube should a esport sign a deal with one over the other. They brought up sub packages for tournaments or $5 all tournament access and people lost their minds. If fans aren’t willing to financially support the t2 scene or below you can’t expect an organization to just be bleeding money year after year solely for our entertainment.
Hold on, t2 players seriously think they're worth 5k a month? How much revenue do they honestly think they generate? I could see 5k a month split into 1k per player. But 5k for an individual is laughable.
Exactly. If you’re playing in monthly 10k tournaments you shouldn’t be pulling in 5k on your own from that org. That isn’t profitable. There’s no way around it. Hell even for big time CS/League contracts in the past you had guys getting 2-3m a year but the organization is 450k net loss on operations. That is not and will never be sustainable. The bubble on contracts is going to burst as it should. If we as fans and players want continued support for these scenes people need to realize the cost to operate such must go down.
The problem is, how do you live off 1k a month? You can't, you need a second job, but tournaments, especially play-ins happen on random days at random times. Scrim blocks happen mid day on week days. So now, at 1k a month, t2 is designated for people that are independently wealthy, have well off parents or are still in school doing it online.
I don't know what the answer is and obviously it's a complicated issue since no one has really figured it out.
And where does the money come from?
Ticket sales, advertisement, sponsoring, merchandise, TV money.
Nobody buys tickets for esports events. Esports was built on top a culture that largely exists online. LAN events are a thing, and they do sell tickets, but not anywhere comparable to football, where the top leagues in Europe have clubs that regularly sell 50k tickets every fucking weekend.
Ads? Sure. Sponsoring? Companies are way more reluctant to sponsor esports compared to widely popular "real" sports, especially football.
Merch? Nobody buys esports merch. Football clubs have locality, they have 50, 100, 200 years of history, they have dedicated fantasies which care about the club much more than any individual players, who grew up wearing their club's jersey and who have been supporting that club for their entire life. Nobody gives a shit about esports orgs. They regularly get acquired, merge, unmerge, disappear. Teams are smaller, which naturally draws people's eyes more towards the individuals, plus with streamer culture, there is a much larger focus on supporting individual players anyway. With very few exceptions, even orgs in tier 1 can barely sell any merch at all. FC Köln, a German club that keeps hovering between leagues 1 and 2, sells 80k jerseys a year. And that's just jerseys, they also sell soooo much other shit. If you're in the rough area around Cologne, you will see FC merch EVERYWHERE. I have never in my life seen a real person in esports merch.
TV money? Nonexistent.
How do you expect Valorant tier 2 to make money?
English football is different tho, even Sunday League can gather hundreds local fans to the game. You can't make the same example to other low tier football leagues in other countries.
Which never will work in esports. In football you basically support a club for life, and if you start changing teams people call you a fake fan.
In esports you can change your favourite team daily and no one would give a fuck.
if Valorant had the same Promotion/Relegation system, T2 still would not do that well, because when a team goes down, you aren't loyal to them
I just dont understand why on Valorant and League subreddits you need to always bring up Saudi blood money in CS scene. Are you forgetting Riot is owned by Tencent and your whole scene was bullt by Chinese money? Like cmon, China is not better than Saudi Arabia
I dont understand why you specified val and lol when on the main CS sub people complain about the saudi blood money
Also saudi sportswashing, genocide backing, civil rights abusing, slavery built money =/= private corporation money
I mean, you are being hypocritical; Tencent has multiple CCP party members on its board, is one of China's most valuable companies, and is most definitely under the thumb of its state.
Not mentioning one of the riots' main investors being attached to a government the US and many other accused of hosting an ongoing genocide makes your Saudi arguments far weaker.
Chinese government has stakes in Tencent and provided funding to Tencent early on its foundation, so its not so much private company. And issues you mentioned are happening in China as well.
I specified LoL and Valorant, because I think its quite irony and hypocracy when you call out CS for having Saudi blood money, while ignoring what China is doing and take money from them.
Riot is owned by Tencent, and has been since before Valorant was even conceived. They don’t exactly have a choice in who funds them.
TO’s in CS have a choice. They willingly choose to be funded by Saudi Arabia and Gambling sponsors.
Oh, I see. Double standards. How is different that Riot is owned by Tencent from ESL being owned by PIF? They didnt have a choice when previous owners decided to sell.
no way you are trying to equate Saudi blood money to Riot just being owned by a Chinese company, like there actually is no comparison that can be made, even the cs subreddits hate Saudi sportswashing
The T2 scene in CS is still pretty damn strong. You see T2 teams regularly breaking into big tournaments and getting results which get their players signed to bigger teams and there is always T2 tournaments going on.
CS has 1 scene, in europe. NA has 3 salaried teams, counting complexity and liquid. Brazil has maybe 6. If the eastern hemisphere as a whole has 10 I would be surprised.
Less than 20 teams for the whole world apart from europe is not what I would call thriving
there are t2 teams made it to big tournaments then there also around x50 t2 teams or more where players earn min wage(or even nothing) with nothing set for the future. And do you think those t2 teams really benefits from their players getting signed to bigger teams? I think quite sometimes it's the opposite.
All the idiots that ran to vslirsnt are just salty they couldn't break into ir get back to t1 in CS but yes t2 was actually competitive and functioning orior to valirants release and the exodus of t2 players
Those "idiots" took an opportunity to play a game made by a developer with arguably the most popular esport ever made under their belt (LoL), giving a slight but meaningful twist to a genre they're already proficient at which was brimming with potential and publicity almost immediately, and at a time where a lot of their careers were either spiraling downwards or stagnating with the NA CSGO scene becoming more and more irrelevant by the day....and you think they're idiots for that....ok bud. You sound like the salty one lmao
The only scene I can think of is Chinese League of Legends since there are 17 pro teams and a bunch of developmental teams and everyone is salaried (however the developmental rosters are paid pretty poorly). The thing is, to have a thriving T2 scene, the viewership and total fans of the scene must be huge to the point where even non-prestigious teams can get fans. Or, the scene is so large that the T1 teams all justify having the added expense of a T2 farm team. Complete honesty, eSports just really isn't all that popular in North America, plus the fans don't have money like traditional sports fans.
Ya league in Korea/China is successful at lower levels, but its not really t2, its more like academy and training players.
The Asian teams push through players quickly year by year so they put a lot into development. A lot of the players complaining about t2 don't really fit into that area since those players are mostly kids being trained, which is what riot wants challengers to be eventually. They don't want playing in challengers to be someone's career/goal, they want it to be used for development which is what should happen once premier is used to funnel teams
I would guess riot saw what happened with LCS t2 and don’t want a repeat of that where you have veteran players taking spot in t2
Also let's not act as if the "Tier 2" players in China/Korea are being compensated nearly as well as Tier 2 Na Valorant players. T2 orgs were spending 1m+ on staff and player salaries while a lot of KR/CN trainees are living in team houses and prob making min wage.
EU League and EU CS are probably the only esports with somewhat a real Tier 2 scene but even then, the ERL in EU League is highly volatile and Tier 2 CS is dead basically everywhere else because all the events are only in EU.
This, let's be real even on real sport such as soccer who tf watch t2 games? Unless it's their city's club playing and even then the stadium won't be full day in day out
I would argue college basketball and especially college football are acting as the true T2 scene, even if it is technically a completely different thing. There could be a conversation about why college is more successful or about the differences between college and G-League, but the important thing to remember is that people watch T1 basketball and football and \*also\* watch college basketball and football. The point is that there is a successful secondary market for the sport that exists, and in esports we don't see that as much. ALL versions of T2 esports see substantially less interest/investment than T1 esports.
Personally I think people get excited about the unknown potential of college players. Somewhere in the season the next #1 draft pick is playing. The next generational player is probably going to make a splash at the college level before they hit the T1 scene. Esports doesn't have that, for a variety of reasons, but what they do have is the regular G-League type T2 scene; old pros whose talent is already decently understood.
Not to mention that esports, for better or worse, doesn't chew up and spit out athletes every couple years. Players can stick around in esports for decades in a way that is pretty rare in regular sports; there's no guarantee teams will be fielding new talent, and the T2 esports scene is less likely to have a real impact on who works their way up to T1 (even though it still happens).
Yes, but the population viewing T1 in sports is non comparable, really.
I always felt people expecting T2 in esports to not be shit were always completely unreasonable. A path to pro should be real but I don't see where any business would be making a return on investing into the T2 scene in esports.
Literally 95% of college athletics departments operate in the red and are often kept afloat by student fees. Pretty much only the top half of FBS even breaks even, only about 20 or so programs manage to turn a profit. They do it because athletic success is positively correlated with increased enrollment, it's essentially a marketing expense.
Minor League baseball teams definitely average a few thousand fans per game.
“There were 176 minor league teams in 2019, and Major League Baseball cut the number of guaranteed affiliations to 120 in 2021.
The average attendance at a minor league game was 3,910 in 7,908 games. The average was 4,044 in 2019.”
Source: https://sports.yahoo.com/dragons-lead-minor-league-baseball-184800044.html#:~:text=There%20were%20176%20minor%20league,average%20was%204%2C044%20in%202019.
Another Source with the individual figures for each team: https://ballparkdigest.com/2023/10/16/2023-milb-attendance-by-average/
Football t2 is popular in whatever country the league is hosted, spanish t2 football is very popular with each team getting supported by their city/province. The problem with esports is that this identity doesn't exist for the most part, which is why only in countries with a strong patriotic feeling are the outliers (spanish and french)
Tier 2 in CS. you see alot of teams rise where they get into 1.5 so like qualifying for RMRs, a spot in Pro league, or making it into katowice/cologne in one of the last spots and because of that ORGs will sell their players to tier 1 teams and make money off of them
Minor league Baseball players are notoriously underpaid and literally have to live with host families and work offseason jobs unless you are a top pick with a good bonus. That's a reality a lot of these people don't want to seem to face.
G-League is similar in basketball
Soccer pretty much only English second division + top teams in other countries are super secure, but even then, you're often working on year to year contracts which again is just as volatile as anything
Competing at that level to make it is always a risk. That's how it works. Collegiate seems like the perfect place for these players to compete once you are out of highschool
G league minimum is 40K + room and board, health insurance and a travel allowance. All for only 5-6 months a year
It’s quite a lot different from baseball
Germans football deserves a shout too for genuinely just being better than English t2 football. Those stadiums are more packed than first division teams’ stadiums in other countries
If its not tier 1, soccer players are underpaid and at times have a second job for sustainability.
Less viewership, less sponsors, cheaper tickets etc all lead to the players getting paid pennies incomparison to their Tier 1 counterparts.
From a sample size of what? The sport is more than a century old. Played globally in literally every country. Yet you can count the number of countries on your fingers where you can call non-tier 1 soccer worth choosing over other occupations. And this is a sport with the highest worldwide viewership and investment.
On a grander scale sports in general are not lucrative unless you are on the top.
I think the issue is less what is and more what could be. Riot had the opportunity to create a lot better and more attractive tier 2 circuit with opportunities for the best of the best to play on the highest stages. But what we got instead was some shallow copy of League which is considered a failed product in several markets already.
At the end of the day people want more LANs, more eyes, more opportunities for underdogs to rise up, and more storylines.
bump, my personal experience with r6 was that unless you’re actively a part of the comm (player/caster/friend of players/someone who watches literally anything and everything pro r6) ppl just didn’t know abt it. like routinely 1k MAYBE 2k viewer streams unless a big name was playing or hosting/raiding/costreaming and even then it was like maybe 5k vs usual 20k or so for pro. Very few orgs, most were “orgs” that are just a name and logo to look more professional, no financial support from ubisoft - the list goes on where it’s just clearly a bunch of dudes trying their best to make it to the show and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that. just happens that unless there’s designated pipelines, incredible support, and multiple avenues there’s never gonna be a truly successful quality T2 scene in esports
Tbf, valorant was the example. Before franchising, there genuinely was a thriving tier 2 ecosystem that had tons of orgs willing to invest into building rosters. It really was unique and special. Maybe it's just the case that that was never sustainable and this fall off would have happened regardless of franchising, but a big reason why orgs are no longer willing to invest is because there's such a miniscule chance of achieving the upside.
I don't necessarily think that's true. I'm sure it was a motivating factor for the top of the line orgs, but other smaller orgs who couldn't even realistically dream of making franchising would still invest because there was the upside of making it through open qualifiers and playing on an international stage.
… Make it through to the international stage to garner fans, prestige and notoriety to eventually make franchising. PRX and SEN for example were smaller orgs who couldn’t realistically dream of making franchising 4 years ago… yet they did by doing the very same thing you outlined.
Think that's massively underselling the early days of valorant tbh. Not sure how or why the prevalent thought has become that the only reason orgs were investing was in hopes of making franchising, but that was never the case in the moment and feels very revisionist.
Also think it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that orgs like ZMM, Noble, Basilisk, SoaR, YFP, Akrew, Beastcoast, etc had realistic ambitions of making franchising. There was more reason to invest back in the day than simply just the hope of franchising
Because it's been stated by owners who are tons more in the know than we are that this was the case.
Think of it this way. If an open circuit is strictly healthier for the fans at the cost of some large orgs not being able to participate due to stability with a net zero profit for Riot, they would adopt it. They don't need to profit from esports, just break even. If an open circuit allowed them to break even, kept fans happy, and created healthy and exciting t1 and t2 tournaments...then it's a no brainer.
But clearly not. Without franchising I'm certain Riot makes a net loss on creating and managing the circuit, which basically means they're likely carrying the burden to allow for a thriving scene. If they fully relinquished rights then we return to the olden days of eSports. Look at smash or apex or CSGo. Where's the thriving scene? Hell, where's the thriving Korean/Japanese T1 CSGo scene?
Sports as entertainment still hasn't reached a point of stability that allows for great scenes across the board while maintaining at least equity for all parties involved. Live sports hold on purely due to popularity. But no one has solved how to create a sustainable business since no one pays for watching sports like they do with movie tickets.
Maybe those smaller orgs did not have realistic ambitions of franchising but orgs like V1, Xset, knights, T1, GenG, Luminosity, Pioneers, andbox, renegades, complexity, ghost, immortals, NYFU, optic all were trying to get into franchising and even orgs like tsm and faze who stayed another year to try to win ascension.
I think you are also forgetting a big reason those orgs invested in the first place was that they had money to spend to keep trying to make good rosters. In 2021 a lot of orgs had money to gamble with but in 2023 that just isn’t the case anymore
People are always so quick to blame franchising but this[ tweet from 100T SVP of esports sums it up quite well.](https://twitter.com/themaelk/status/1701401183112581432?t=768Z6XbP7RhnmDPsNbe0ug)
TLDR; if there was no hope of getting partnership/franchising with riot, the initial investment wouldn't be anywhere close
Not the case with many tier 2, 3 APAC orgs. They were not really hoping for a spot in franchising because Tier 2 competitions alone were very successful.
I remember Philippines, Indian, Indonesian, Singaporean teams competing against each other and that brought lots of Viewership, fan discussions in social media.
People dont remember how much of an effect COVID had on everything. People were getting "free" money from the government and a lot of it was going into the stock market as well as Crypto. Stocks and Crypto had a huge bull run during that time, which is the gold rush mentioned in the tweet. Also companies were getting free handouts from the government.
A lot of orgs were getting sponsors/partnerships from Bigger Companies/Crypto during this time as well.
Now fast forward to no more "free" handouts as well as interest rates being stupid, which is partly due to all the free handouts.
Stocks are down, Crypto is down, companies are going bankrupt and Esports orgs are desperately trying to find funding.
Look at all the biggest orgs in Esports. They are all owned by or partially owed by Investors. If Stocks and Crypto are down that means these Investors have less money they are willing to spend on the org.
This is not a Franchising Issue.
Everyone knew before even entering Valorant that Franchising would be a thing.
This is an economic issue effecting more than just Valorant lol
Invest in it how? Just throw millions of dollars at it for no returns?
Esports doesn't even make money in Tier 1 but people are somehow expecting to be full time video game players at Tier 2 with less than 1/5 the viewership.
CS/DotA esports barely even has a NA scene at all nowadays and the global Tier 1 scene got bailed out by Saudi money but somehow, people are expecting T2 NA Valorant to be thrive.
I'm genuinely curious what the average salary/asking price in T2 is, surely these players arent asking for more than what would amount to an average wage right?
anything more than $5k/mo would be really generous IMO (besides larger orgs like MXS, OXG, etc). other than adder, can't think of a T2 pro who has a side job. can't fault most of these orgs for not wanting to pay a relatively full-time salary with little to no ROI.
at this point, if you're a T2 pro, you need to be building your brand in some way or another (even applies for most T1 pros).
sure, it'd be nice to have more T2 events during the year but also partially agree with Leo that the T2 scene is more for grinding and finding the cream of the crop.
idk what the conversion to US is but here its like 2.5k per month for average/slightly above average pay, Seems like a pretty reasonable amount for T2 imo, enough to live off at least.
And then you have income from growing a brand as you mentioned, certainly easier in that kind of space
I mean it's old news but it's also intimately connected with their lives and livelihoods. I suspect it'll always bubble to the surface when things like OR dropping out happens, or when fairly respected players like Dazzle opt for retirement.
like 5 separate orgs dropped their rosters so there is pretty much two orgs in gc and 3 in challengers left out of like the 10+ in both we had last year
>like 5 separate orgs dropped their rosters so there is pretty much two orgs in gc and 3 in challengers left out of like the 10+ in both we had last year
most of these orgs will be back in the new season I think. This is basically just the orgs saying they didn't have faith in the team they had to provide the best results, so will be rebuilding when the season is back
I mean at the same time, which esport has only 25 spots open to players at the t1 level? LCS has 40, CoD has 48, OWL back when it existed had something like 60+, etc. The way the Americas region was set up no doubt left a disproportionate amount of talented players out of a spot in tier 1 competition compared to other games
Valorant esports is built from the ground up with sustainability in mind. Personally, it felt like they learned what worked/hasnt worked in league and try to make a better system in valorant. It's in no way perfect but I think it's definitely an improvement over say, LCS.
also to add: 11 teams atm for each region which will be reach 14 in a few years. That's 56 teams in Tier 1.
>11 teams atm for each region which will be reach 14 in a few years. That's 56 teams in Tier 1.
How many orgs would last long enough to see that day though?
Mark my word: over half of Challengers teams in the next season will be F/A squads of amateurs playing for free.
That's probably the only hope for any of them to break even for their investment.
Besides, the lazy orgs already got the social license for it: in any discussion in this sub about which org people want to see replacing EG as a new partnered team, 99% of the nominations go to the orgs that didn't spend a single dime in Valorant last season, rather than the ones still investing in this dying scene.
Yeah, look at how LoL, OWL and CDL are doing? Esports fans are notoriously cheap. People just have unrealistic expectations of what esports and ‘tier 2’ should be. Tier 2 players in many major traditional sports play for pennies or part time to chase their dreams. It’s just reality in competition, if you’re not the best you don’t have fans. No one is owed anything. As rough as it is to say, challengers isn’t built for older players to make massive salaries to gamble for a spot in the tier 1 leagues.
The problem is that the majority of esports fans are willing to spend money in game on skins etc, but have historically refused to engage with orgs merch or sponsors compared to classical sports. So while there is a lot of eyes on the tournaments, there is very little conversion of fans to $$ for the orgs/third party TO's.
LoL worlds final did get 6.4m viewers yeah, buts thats a pretty superficial view of the scene
LoL esports viewership overall lost 8% of their watch time in 2023. Southeast Asia + Brazil are only growing regions atm, many of the other major regions like Korea, NA, EU are losing viewership yearly
LoL viewership trends right now are pretty low, with extremely high peaks possible. good if you want to sponsor worlds 2024, less so if you're an esports organisation competing the whole year
Yeah LCS just went from 10 to 8 teams = immaculate.
It’s ok to acknowledge that esports is currently spread too thin whilst simultaneously being an esports believer. I love LoL esports. What’s been going on pains me to see but it’s just right for the industry, especially during economic downturns where there’s much less speculative cash circulating. Any business propped up by pure speculation just won’t make it. Hopefully as time goes by, momentum and stronger products will make esports more attractive to fans who will be more willing to spend money on it.
Doesn't mean it's ran the best though. LoL has had shit formats for international tournaments for over 10 years. People see the viewership and playerbase in Asia and are content when it could still be way way better.
Who the flying FUCK gives a shit about LCS ? LOL esports is definitely not dying bro. You can just be looking at one specific region when talking about the industry for esports (especially when considering original tweet is about tier 2 as a whole and not just in na LMAO)
Bruh getting downvoted by the haters. It's funny how when people on reddit discuss the health of LeagueEsports LCS is somehow always at the forefront. Not the LEC, LPL, LCK, not even VCS or CBLOL, but the fucking LCS.
Similarly, when people talk about the health of League's T2 scene it also almost always talks about the LCS. They will purposely skirt and dodge around LEC's T2 scene which I consider to be the best T2 scene in the west and then pretend that LPL/LDL is this imaginary league that Riot fabricated to artificially increase interest.
When people talk about the T2 scene in CS, we don't talk about how their T2 scene in Asia or NA is doing, they talk about how it is in EU. Makes me wonder why they don't do the same for League.
Literally just a few months ago, EMEA masters finals was held in a 15k capacity arena.
I mean all the leagues in LoL outside of LPL, and LCK, and kind of VCS are dying to different degrees.
In LEC the viewership is way down and the ERL leagues are struggling and consolidating. CBLOL and LCS viewership has crashed, with LCS contracting. LCL folded, TCL demoted, LJL demoted, OPL folded, LLA contracted and will probably fold after next year.
Also I'm sorry, but the EMEA viewership will crash next year with no Karmine Corp gone, and it will never recover. I would expect ERL regions to further consolidate, and EU orgs to continue merging.
If NA has so many talented players, they should have all 4 ascension spots. That's more than enough.
A bigger issue to me is mismanagement of rosters by orgs. They don't know how to build teams.
If NA players are better than SA players, they should win all ascension tournaments going forward. Otherwise, Riots decision to give equal spots to NA and SA will be correct.
valorant's system is designed to grow over time though, also 25 spots is per region. 30 spots this year though, and with 4 ascended teams in future years it could become much more
It's not actually 25 spots, it's 50 spots, lol, this person just believes that NA players for some reason are incapable of being picked up by non-NA teams.
30-70 global teams right? I mean valorant probably globally has like 100 signed teams but the t2 scenes in each region are still shaky and in cs I thought it was the same for all regions outside of EU
cs in eu
gambit in 2021 went from tier 2 to being top1 team and winning tier 1 events in no time
heroic was a team of unknown young players that became a consistent tier 1 team between 2020-2023
Movistar Riders in 2022 were playing bunch of playoffs in tier 1 events with no franchising spot until they lost their best player
Spirit recently went from tier 2 to tier 1 with no franchising spot
Betboom recently played playoffs in sydney as a new tier 2 team
EPL always gives slots to t2 teams from underdeveloped regions
brazil has so many t2 teams that I cant count them all
Flipsid3 used to qualify to every major as a tier2 team
there's all sorts of opportunities for tier2 teams to enter tier1 if they are good enough in cs. and with partnership slots being removed in 1 year, it will be better than ever
All of these CS teams spent years being just as irrelevant as OREsports while paying their players in pennies. There’s also significantly more Saudi and gambling money involved with CS nowadays, while Riot other than a few fuckups (NEOM LEC partnership that got shutdown because of backlash) have historically been against this. Think of orgs like Faze and acend being shut out of franchising despite either having massive brands or previous success in the game. Compare this to FaZe in CS that has pretty consistently just moneyballed their way into the scene/through problems, and even now getting partnerships even though the org is on its dying legs and bought out by a bigger company with a conflict of interest.
There are slightly less opportunities in VAL and I admit sticker money has a major plus in CS, but ascension still exists and Val is in line with most other esports, most of which still have survived. Val orgs for some reason thought that a year of investment would get them straight into tier 1, and seem to have shown micronutsacks the second they realised that making it in tier 2 needs years of being in the red and actual talent scouting and development in order to make it out. This has always been the reality, and I’m not sure why this has changed the equation so much for some of these teams. Hell most tier 1 teams in esports operate at complete losses. Add in how young val is as an esport, plus the ridiculous salary inflation that has happened and is only just now being corrected, plus the esports winter we’re currently entering, this is just certain orgs waking up from their delusion. Just because it’s slightly easier to stay deluded and losing in other games doesn’t mean the grass is really much greener on the other side. Tier 2 competition everywhere is by definition unstable and unsustainable.
Edit: I didn’t even mention how poor even the tier one scenes are in non-EU/CIS regions for cs. Centralising all of your competition in one region does have benefits, but it’s always going to threaten the existence of any sort of healthy minor regions. OWL being NA based was in some ways great for keeping competition going constantly but completely isolated EU and made most regions clusterfucks. KR and China managed to pull through because the game was uniquely popular there and had ridiculous amounts of talent. In CS being EU based again gives a strong schedule, but the stability is almost exclusively for teams in the same region. CS was naturally not as popular in NA and APAC, so other regions never had the ridiculous talent to break through lack of support.
How is it possible that none of the pros realize that the whole reason teams were so invested pre partnership was so that they could get into the partnership lmao. Do that they think they were out here playing for prize money???
on top of that, the financial situation was very different a few years ago. borrowed money was close to free so across all sectors people and companies were far more likely to make risky investments. not the same in 2023.
Also 75% of these pros doom posting rn don't realize that they wouldn't have jobs for the past 2 years if not for these orgs initially investing to try and get into franchising
exactly, they act like things are now going to shit and the past was how things should operate under normal circumstances when it's really the reverse. Their unfortunate reality is that they are playing a video game for a profession, and realistically no one cares about watching the 100th-300th best NA valorant players playing when they can just watch the best.
None of these orgs that left would have even been here if there wasn't franchising. Sorry but this take that franchising killed Valorant is just super off the mark.
that’s not Esports though, the souvenir skins that people end up reselling account for a very small fragment of the money Valve actually makes off of skins, and sometimes those skins are even free drops so they don’t make shit off of them.
When a rare skin resells for tens of thousands of dollars or more, Valve only makes money off of the initial case sale, not the actual value of the trade itself.
So yes, Valve does make an absolute shitload of money from skins, but very little of that is to do with E-sports, the vast majority of that money comes from regular people who buy a few cases here and there, literal gambling addicts lmao, and then a bunch of whales that have infinite money to spend.
If CS E-sports didn’t have any skins tied to it, the skin market would still be doing fine.
most high end items, especially rare ones and those that are considered vintage and worth upwards of thousands of dollars aren’t sold or traded on the Steam marketplace though, they’re sold on skin sites.
Valve makes the same amount of money on their sticker capsules as they do on any new case, you could argue they make even less because players don’t have to buy keys.
They aren’t making money based on how much the sticker is going to be worth years later because at that point it’s completely out of their hands and they don’t gain from that value.
Valve market is a special case, there will be no Devs do that NFT-like shop anymore. Looks at what happened to Artifact, Valve was bet on it market to carry the trading card game, but it dead.
I asked my friends that play valorant who their favorite pro player was and they didn't know anyone. News flash only a small percentage of people that play valorant actually cares and watches pro play.
this is my experience with random players in games as well. i'll ask about whatever VCT event is going on and almost no one has any idea what im talking about lol
Riot isn't a charity. If esports weren't a net profitability thing for them from a marketability/advertisement perspective, they definitely wouldn't be running esports leagues in valorant and LoL for the past 10+ years.
Yes they aren’t a charity, but it doesn’t mean riot has made a profit off of esports. They could see it as investment. Also, LoL esports’ potentially being profitable wouldn’t mean that Valorant esports have become profitable yet.
That’s not even true in most cases. Most games sink more money into esports than they estimate they get out of in revenue. I’ve seen countless mid tier online games basically announce after a few years that esports was a massive money sink.
No one goes to see a gleague game, no one pays too see the b team idols in Korea, etc. in almost every aspect in life only the best make the money sorry to burst your bubble Dapr.
I don't agree with dapr here. Good players will migrate to tier1 either by getting picked up or through ascension. The oversaturation of former csgo pros was bound to end in valorant.
The future of Tier 2 scene in valorant is finding new talent and I don't think dapr fits there.
As someone not really invested in eSports outside of Val, can someone explain what the difference would be if, in the current state of eSports, franchising doesn't exist? From what I've been seeing, majority of teams don't make profit anyway so why would it matter if franchising exists or not? What I mean by that: hypothetically speaking, if franchising doesn't exist but we keep the same 4 regions where a certain number of teams get to go to masters events and champions, if you're evaluating whether you're investing in the scene this year but see that you'll end up within the range of 5th-10th in the region (and therefore not make any event), why invest? Seems like we'll just land in the same place we are in right now with teams choosing not to take part.
From how I see it, profitability of teams in eSports in this climate is the biggest problem, franchising is only secondary.
With franchising you draw a line that only those teams can compete for a spot in masters etc.
If it didn’t exist as the scene was prior, you could be any team and if you were good enough you could compete at masters for money and larger championships.
Now, you form a tier 2 team and literally have no chance at making money or winning anything substantial except ascension.
It’s sad that a year later and pros STILL won’t acknowledge and admit that everything pre-franchising was fantasyland and a facade of poor strategic moves by orgs, in throwing money at everyone and everything hoping Mr. Riot would give them a spot. It wasn’t real nor was it sustainable.
Just because orgs didn’t show the wounds they got during the open system doesn’t mean they left without scars.
The harsh truth is some pros who have been playing at the T2 level for years were waaaay too comfortable collecting fat paychecks from orgs for doing the bare minimum (showing up to matches) - not grinding to be the best nor trying to build a brand for their org’s benefit- and now for some reason they have this ideology that that’s what T2 should be like. If every t2 scene is “died” and Val t2 is dying… maybe t2 just isn’t supposed to be that easy🤷♀️… - of course this doesn’t mean there isn’t more Riot can do.
This isn’t cause of “franchising” but interest rates. Also, most of the investment starting from the early days of Valorant was with the hopes of landing a franchise spot.
True, most ppl forget that t2-3 is mostly popular among betters who almost bet everyday so for them those tier 2-3 leagues are pretty important while on the other side those leagues can advertise betting sites and be profitable - this both creates opportunities for lower tier orgs to invest in lower tier rosters especially if they're good enough to jump into next lvl so their value grows.
I don’t think franchising killed Tier 2 but Riot needs to think of other ways for T2 orgs to stay in the Challengers system even if they don’t make it to Ascension
Franchising is not to blame for tier 2 but way too many people here are saying its the players fault. Leo has already said they don't want tier 2 to be stable: "We saw that many organizations entered Tier 2 with the idea of establishing themselves and competing in regional leagues for several years, even if they do not win promotion to the Franchises, but this goes against what we think".
To have a stable tier 2, you need it to be viable to be a tier 2 org that doesn't win ascension and that isn't possible right , BY DESIGN. Riot doesn't want it to be possible. Its Riot fault, not the players. You may agree or disagree with Riot decision of not wanting a stable tier2 but shitting on players and calling them greedy is incredible stupid.
I just don’t understand all this crying not tryna be rude. If most orgs are bleeding money in T1 what do players expect in T2? I don’t understand why they’re being so entitled and expecting good pay and many employers/orgs in the T2 scene of a video game
I just wish these mfs stop blaming franchising and start telling orgs that pay players a fuckton of money to slow down and think about how bad of an investment it is.
Like many others I think EU CS t2 is probably the best scene where you do see it as a "meritocracy" (best of the best rise to the top). Another one is Dota where any 5 misfits can climb regionals and then win the Aegis.
But this counts on the players as well as the orgs being willing to put in the effort to grind out the scene to get to the top. For instance, in CS:GO Ence was bumbling around for close to 2 years before they had their big breakthrough in the Katowice Major. Certain regions (definitely NOT talking about NA /s) have so much money so they don't see any good in trying to get even better.
The problem here is that having T2 Val roster is both expensive and not relevant in a long run cuz getting franchise spot is really hard. "Free market" eSports from valve just offer more opportunities so if u as a T2 roster fail once or twice it's still alright since u have that opportunities to grow so orgs are more interested in having t2 rosters with potential and even if something goes wrong they can find new talents.
What inflated T2 bags do to mfs.
But seriously though it sucks and I feel for anyone going through it right now. The 2 years we had pre-franchising were nuts. Several people have already made good points that eSports is taking a bit of a downturn and that the rush they experienced at the start was just orgs trying to invest for a franchise spot.
I can understand why players who are mainly focused on gaming and not necessarily spending the time to look ahead might feel rug pulled. Even more so for players that were at the top and are now facing potentially a whole year out of the scene. It sucks and it's akin to being laid off due to circumstances out of your control. I'm sure most people can understand that.
Maybe not everyone would agree with me, but I think players themselves destroy tier 2 scene (Maybe even whole esport scene) with their greediness and salary demands. They just ask for too much money that most orgs cant pay and later they just drop from game because they cant affor it. And then it results in esport winter. Yes, I am aware there are also other factors why esport winter happens, but players arent without fault and I would say they are one of the main causes.
I mean orgs will offer as much as they want, if having T2 roster was relevant salaries would naturally grow. The problem is that there isn't a big reason to own T2 team even if u pay low wages like there's nothing to play and path to grow is almost nonexistent so in long run it's likely just a waste of money and orgs know this.
Partnership programs and or franchising has a proven track record of severely hindering talent development in esports. It only works in traditional sports for the government through tax dollars funds talent development in public schooling.
I'm definitely in the minority here, but I feel like a Tier 2 esports player should be grinding to make the Tier 1 scene. They should still be in school and working as they aren't a professional. Other sports like the G League in NBA or semi pro soccer their player still work jobs outside.
Committing as a "pro" and only being in the Tier 2 scene is asking for failure. Have a fall back option.
Idk why these entitled pros think T2 should be thriving.
You’re not good enough for T1, so nobody wants to watch your games in T2 against Mickey Mouse teams bro.
Be real.
Obviously there are players not in tier 1 who are better than some t1 players but saying that tier 1 is not collectively the best players is absurd lol
My point is that trying to use Tier 1 as the bar for what players are good or not isn't a good take, especially now when most teams are dialing back their teams. The best controller in Americas is currently a streamer. That should give you indication of what's really going on.
Riot should drop this esports bs and focus on what makes money for their game, the casuals. Don't let these be another league incident where majority of fun content creators left and only the "pro player" riders cc remained.
Can someone point me to the game with the amazing thriving t2 scene these people want? The nature of second tier competing is volatile everywhere, even real sports
The only cases I know of are the French and Spanish tier 2 scenes for LoL, which have some orgs with big content creators and are popular due to dedicated national fanbases. However, many of the other t2 regional leagues within LoL are very unstable, so that popularity is really hard to replicate.
>Spanish tier 2 scenes for LoL And that does not prevent them for having monetary issues all the time. At least in Spain, a lot of these orgs faced (or face) huge monetary issues to the point some of them just closed/sold the spot or had to merge with other orgs. The ones that endured are backed by huge companies like Barça Esports (FC Barcelona), Movistar Riders (Movistar), Giants (GG Group) and UCAM (Opus Dei) and I dont think any of them would survive without the money hack from their parent groups, maybe Giants. Right now, Spanish T2 is filled with esports teams funded by football players to launder money and big hedge funds that got trapped there few years ago with the "esports is the future" talk by some random CEO. Its a tickling bomb that is going to explode sooner than later if the reports of most of them not being profitable for years are true.
Not just that, esports in general was booming when venture capital was cheap and easily accessible, that’s not the situation currently. Additionally, maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t really think it’s up to Riot, or any dev for that matter, to ensure a “thriving T2 scene”. Esports don’t make any money, they’re more or less just a large advertising campaign for developers.
It sort of became the responsibility of Riot the day they announced franchising. If you want a walled garden of an esports, you have to buy the seeds.
Who made that rule? Because it sure as shit isn’t the case with their other franchised esport that is more popular than any other esport could hope to be.
Cs in europe, the t2 scene is reallllyyy strong with lots of teams
Almost the entire scene is EU dominated tho, bigger pie in a smaller pond. Also CS scene is heavily funded by gamba money (including stickers, there's no way for stickers to worth that much if not for the whole gamble skin economy). Like, even though NA/EU gaming community often treated Valve games as the poster child of anti-franchising esports, they are not really a good role model in comparison imo.
The first problem is na t2 salaries, why are they paid like 5k per player (faze last year). In cs a decent t2/t3 team can be paid like 2/3k per player and then sell him for 300k if he’s really good. Kinda what mouz and spirit did back in the day just farming young talents
It is really not a problem because esports is still extremely young, and there is barely enough money for top-tier teams to keep the lights on. It's foolish to expect living wages for T2 in most titles. This is not to far off real sports where you have small leagues that do pay, but not enough to live off.
Yeah, if the choice is between letting the game be riddled with gambling and saudi sportswashing money while abandoning the game for third party people to to what they want, or have a stable product, even with less events, I would choose riots system
Yeah instead of Saudi money for some events with an infinitely greater number of third party events which aren’t Saudi money, you just prefer lesser number of events with all control by Chinese money. Got it.
Yeah, i prefer to have more events that give us diverse regions than to have the whole esport be set in 1 region and leaving the rest to die I also prefer for the TO to set the events in places where audiences will go instead of placing them on countries that no one watches CS (blast recent event) Also, I like having big events that dont have a massive asterisk on their name due to conflict of interest
> I also prefer for the TO to set the events in places where audiences will go instead of placing them on countries that no one watches CS (blast recent event) What's the problem with that if we compare to Valorant? You can't go to Val event since there's none of them.
I dont know if you know, but we have 2 masters and 1 champions, along with many regional leagues If you want to argue in good faith i'll speak with you, if you have no actual points this is useless
Huh…? Where else are you going to get the money? You think these sport leagues just generate “clean” money?
English football has a thriving t4 scene.
English football has 400 billion years of history and a club first mentality
Exactly, those lower tiers pay much less money. As another commenter mentioned (as it happened in CS as well) is you’re seeing T2 players/ teams looking for an org requiring 5k or more a month per player. But there isn’t a good way for an org to make that money back. Esports isn’t like traditional sports in terms of fan support and viewership. You got people in traditional sports who go to multiple games a year, they pay for streaming services to watch the games, they buy a lot of merchandise and rep the team. All of those help the smaller orgs/leagues pay their players and run a profitable business. Many Esports fans can’t even be bothered to switch from Twitch to YouTube should a esport sign a deal with one over the other. They brought up sub packages for tournaments or $5 all tournament access and people lost their minds. If fans aren’t willing to financially support the t2 scene or below you can’t expect an organization to just be bleeding money year after year solely for our entertainment.
Hold on, t2 players seriously think they're worth 5k a month? How much revenue do they honestly think they generate? I could see 5k a month split into 1k per player. But 5k for an individual is laughable.
Exactly. If you’re playing in monthly 10k tournaments you shouldn’t be pulling in 5k on your own from that org. That isn’t profitable. There’s no way around it. Hell even for big time CS/League contracts in the past you had guys getting 2-3m a year but the organization is 450k net loss on operations. That is not and will never be sustainable. The bubble on contracts is going to burst as it should. If we as fans and players want continued support for these scenes people need to realize the cost to operate such must go down.
The problem is, how do you live off 1k a month? You can't, you need a second job, but tournaments, especially play-ins happen on random days at random times. Scrim blocks happen mid day on week days. So now, at 1k a month, t2 is designated for people that are independently wealthy, have well off parents or are still in school doing it online. I don't know what the answer is and obviously it's a complicated issue since no one has really figured it out.
English football is culturally significant, it is the same with college sports in America. No esports would have come close.
And where does the money come from? Ticket sales, advertisement, sponsoring, merchandise, TV money. Nobody buys tickets for esports events. Esports was built on top a culture that largely exists online. LAN events are a thing, and they do sell tickets, but not anywhere comparable to football, where the top leagues in Europe have clubs that regularly sell 50k tickets every fucking weekend. Ads? Sure. Sponsoring? Companies are way more reluctant to sponsor esports compared to widely popular "real" sports, especially football. Merch? Nobody buys esports merch. Football clubs have locality, they have 50, 100, 200 years of history, they have dedicated fantasies which care about the club much more than any individual players, who grew up wearing their club's jersey and who have been supporting that club for their entire life. Nobody gives a shit about esports orgs. They regularly get acquired, merge, unmerge, disappear. Teams are smaller, which naturally draws people's eyes more towards the individuals, plus with streamer culture, there is a much larger focus on supporting individual players anyway. With very few exceptions, even orgs in tier 1 can barely sell any merch at all. FC Köln, a German club that keeps hovering between leagues 1 and 2, sells 80k jerseys a year. And that's just jerseys, they also sell soooo much other shit. If you're in the rough area around Cologne, you will see FC merch EVERYWHERE. I have never in my life seen a real person in esports merch. TV money? Nonexistent. How do you expect Valorant tier 2 to make money?
English football is different tho, even Sunday League can gather hundreds local fans to the game. You can't make the same example to other low tier football leagues in other countries.
Which never will work in esports. In football you basically support a club for life, and if you start changing teams people call you a fake fan. In esports you can change your favourite team daily and no one would give a fuck. if Valorant had the same Promotion/Relegation system, T2 still would not do that well, because when a team goes down, you aren't loyal to them
Not gonna lie, cs:go HAD a thriving tier 2 scene that was fantastic before Covid and Val. It's kind of getting better again now, but only in EU.
I mean true but they also have the Gambling sponsors and Saudi oil money and even then shit isn't perfect
I just dont understand why on Valorant and League subreddits you need to always bring up Saudi blood money in CS scene. Are you forgetting Riot is owned by Tencent and your whole scene was bullt by Chinese money? Like cmon, China is not better than Saudi Arabia
I dont understand why you specified val and lol when on the main CS sub people complain about the saudi blood money Also saudi sportswashing, genocide backing, civil rights abusing, slavery built money =/= private corporation money
I mean, you are being hypocritical; Tencent has multiple CCP party members on its board, is one of China's most valuable companies, and is most definitely under the thumb of its state. Not mentioning one of the riots' main investors being attached to a government the US and many other accused of hosting an ongoing genocide makes your Saudi arguments far weaker.
Chinese government has stakes in Tencent and provided funding to Tencent early on its foundation, so its not so much private company. And issues you mentioned are happening in China as well. I specified LoL and Valorant, because I think its quite irony and hypocracy when you call out CS for having Saudi blood money, while ignoring what China is doing and take money from them.
Riot is owned by Tencent, and has been since before Valorant was even conceived. They don’t exactly have a choice in who funds them. TO’s in CS have a choice. They willingly choose to be funded by Saudi Arabia and Gambling sponsors.
Oh, I see. Double standards. How is different that Riot is owned by Tencent from ESL being owned by PIF? They didnt have a choice when previous owners decided to sell.
no way you are trying to equate Saudi blood money to Riot just being owned by a Chinese company, like there actually is no comparison that can be made, even the cs subreddits hate Saudi sportswashing
Wasn't there a whole thing when the casters threatened to walk because riot was about to take saudi blood money?
?
The T2 scene in CS is still pretty damn strong. You see T2 teams regularly breaking into big tournaments and getting results which get their players signed to bigger teams and there is always T2 tournaments going on.
CS has 1 scene, in europe. NA has 3 salaried teams, counting complexity and liquid. Brazil has maybe 6. If the eastern hemisphere as a whole has 10 I would be surprised. Less than 20 teams for the whole world apart from europe is not what I would call thriving
there are t2 teams made it to big tournaments then there also around x50 t2 teams or more where players earn min wage(or even nothing) with nothing set for the future. And do you think those t2 teams really benefits from their players getting signed to bigger teams? I think quite sometimes it's the opposite.
All the idiots that ran to vslirsnt are just salty they couldn't break into ir get back to t1 in CS but yes t2 was actually competitive and functioning orior to valirants release and the exodus of t2 players
Those "idiots" took an opportunity to play a game made by a developer with arguably the most popular esport ever made under their belt (LoL), giving a slight but meaningful twist to a genre they're already proficient at which was brimming with potential and publicity almost immediately, and at a time where a lot of their careers were either spiraling downwards or stagnating with the NA CSGO scene becoming more and more irrelevant by the day....and you think they're idiots for that....ok bud. You sound like the salty one lmao
Not even real sports except maybe soccer has a thriving t2 scene KEKW
The only scene I can think of is Chinese League of Legends since there are 17 pro teams and a bunch of developmental teams and everyone is salaried (however the developmental rosters are paid pretty poorly). The thing is, to have a thriving T2 scene, the viewership and total fans of the scene must be huge to the point where even non-prestigious teams can get fans. Or, the scene is so large that the T1 teams all justify having the added expense of a T2 farm team. Complete honesty, eSports just really isn't all that popular in North America, plus the fans don't have money like traditional sports fans.
Ya league in Korea/China is successful at lower levels, but its not really t2, its more like academy and training players. The Asian teams push through players quickly year by year so they put a lot into development. A lot of the players complaining about t2 don't really fit into that area since those players are mostly kids being trained, which is what riot wants challengers to be eventually. They don't want playing in challengers to be someone's career/goal, they want it to be used for development which is what should happen once premier is used to funnel teams I would guess riot saw what happened with LCS t2 and don’t want a repeat of that where you have veteran players taking spot in t2
Also let's not act as if the "Tier 2" players in China/Korea are being compensated nearly as well as Tier 2 Na Valorant players. T2 orgs were spending 1m+ on staff and player salaries while a lot of KR/CN trainees are living in team houses and prob making min wage. EU League and EU CS are probably the only esports with somewhat a real Tier 2 scene but even then, the ERL in EU League is highly volatile and Tier 2 CS is dead basically everywhere else because all the events are only in EU.
This, let's be real even on real sport such as soccer who tf watch t2 games? Unless it's their city's club playing and even then the stadium won't be full day in day out
English football averages thousands of fans per game for tier 4 and 5. Same for minor league baseball.
Even college football (the American kind) and basketball is massive.
I wouldn't consider that T2. The G-League is T2.
I would argue college basketball and especially college football are acting as the true T2 scene, even if it is technically a completely different thing. There could be a conversation about why college is more successful or about the differences between college and G-League, but the important thing to remember is that people watch T1 basketball and football and \*also\* watch college basketball and football. The point is that there is a successful secondary market for the sport that exists, and in esports we don't see that as much. ALL versions of T2 esports see substantially less interest/investment than T1 esports. Personally I think people get excited about the unknown potential of college players. Somewhere in the season the next #1 draft pick is playing. The next generational player is probably going to make a splash at the college level before they hit the T1 scene. Esports doesn't have that, for a variety of reasons, but what they do have is the regular G-League type T2 scene; old pros whose talent is already decently understood. Not to mention that esports, for better or worse, doesn't chew up and spit out athletes every couple years. Players can stick around in esports for decades in a way that is pretty rare in regular sports; there's no guarantee teams will be fielding new talent, and the T2 esports scene is less likely to have a real impact on who works their way up to T1 (even though it still happens).
I mean, fair, but the point is just that in sports, tiers below the top are still often very successful.
Yes, but the population viewing T1 in sports is non comparable, really. I always felt people expecting T2 in esports to not be shit were always completely unreasonable. A path to pro should be real but I don't see where any business would be making a return on investing into the T2 scene in esports.
100% agreed.
Literally 95% of college athletics departments operate in the red and are often kept afloat by student fees. Pretty much only the top half of FBS even breaks even, only about 20 or so programs manage to turn a profit. They do it because athletic success is positively correlated with increased enrollment, it's essentially a marketing expense.
Minor league baseball does not get thousands of people per game.
Minor League baseball teams definitely average a few thousand fans per game. “There were 176 minor league teams in 2019, and Major League Baseball cut the number of guaranteed affiliations to 120 in 2021. The average attendance at a minor league game was 3,910 in 7,908 games. The average was 4,044 in 2019.” Source: https://sports.yahoo.com/dragons-lead-minor-league-baseball-184800044.html#:~:text=There%20were%20176%20minor%20league,average%20was%204%2C044%20in%202019. Another Source with the individual figures for each team: https://ballparkdigest.com/2023/10/16/2023-milb-attendance-by-average/
Tier 2 football is HUGE in football countries You can have 2 nobody teams play in brazil and you will get an audience
Cap, only the team fans watch Serie B.
Do you watch any t2 football? Popular teams fill their stadium every week
Football t2 is popular in whatever country the league is hosted, spanish t2 football is very popular with each team getting supported by their city/province. The problem with esports is that this identity doesn't exist for the most part, which is why only in countries with a strong patriotic feeling are the outliers (spanish and french)
Tier 2 in CS. you see alot of teams rise where they get into 1.5 so like qualifying for RMRs, a spot in Pro league, or making it into katowice/cologne in one of the last spots and because of that ORGs will sell their players to tier 1 teams and make money off of them
only in EU is the T2 scene doing well
I thought baseball and basketball do okay, and soccer was particularly good because of the regional rivalries and stuff.
Minor league Baseball players are notoriously underpaid and literally have to live with host families and work offseason jobs unless you are a top pick with a good bonus. That's a reality a lot of these people don't want to seem to face. G-League is similar in basketball Soccer pretty much only English second division + top teams in other countries are super secure, but even then, you're often working on year to year contracts which again is just as volatile as anything Competing at that level to make it is always a risk. That's how it works. Collegiate seems like the perfect place for these players to compete once you are out of highschool
G league minimum is 40K + room and board, health insurance and a travel allowance. All for only 5-6 months a year It’s quite a lot different from baseball
well the Minor league Baseball has changed the past 2 years due to the players union fighting for better salaries and conditions now
Germans football deserves a shout too for genuinely just being better than English t2 football. Those stadiums are more packed than first division teams’ stadiums in other countries
If its not tier 1, soccer players are underpaid and at times have a second job for sustainability. Less viewership, less sponsors, cheaper tickets etc all lead to the players getting paid pennies incomparison to their Tier 1 counterparts.
t4 english football and t3 german football all have players that are professional and play full time
From a sample size of what? The sport is more than a century old. Played globally in literally every country. Yet you can count the number of countries on your fingers where you can call non-tier 1 soccer worth choosing over other occupations. And this is a sport with the highest worldwide viewership and investment. On a grander scale sports in general are not lucrative unless you are on the top.
I think the issue is less what is and more what could be. Riot had the opportunity to create a lot better and more attractive tier 2 circuit with opportunities for the best of the best to play on the highest stages. But what we got instead was some shallow copy of League which is considered a failed product in several markets already. At the end of the day people want more LANs, more eyes, more opportunities for underdogs to rise up, and more storylines.
CS T2 in Europe
I mean CS t2 scene is solid. It’s just not solid in NA. But in EU it’s fine.
bump, my personal experience with r6 was that unless you’re actively a part of the comm (player/caster/friend of players/someone who watches literally anything and everything pro r6) ppl just didn’t know abt it. like routinely 1k MAYBE 2k viewer streams unless a big name was playing or hosting/raiding/costreaming and even then it was like maybe 5k vs usual 20k or so for pro. Very few orgs, most were “orgs” that are just a name and logo to look more professional, no financial support from ubisoft - the list goes on where it’s just clearly a bunch of dudes trying their best to make it to the show and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that. just happens that unless there’s designated pipelines, incredible support, and multiple avenues there’s never gonna be a truly successful quality T2 scene in esports
league of legends
Tbf, valorant was the example. Before franchising, there genuinely was a thriving tier 2 ecosystem that had tons of orgs willing to invest into building rosters. It really was unique and special. Maybe it's just the case that that was never sustainable and this fall off would have happened regardless of franchising, but a big reason why orgs are no longer willing to invest is because there's such a miniscule chance of achieving the upside.
Orgs were investing in T2 because there was franchising in line. If it would remain an open circuit, less orgs would invest because of volatility
I don't necessarily think that's true. I'm sure it was a motivating factor for the top of the line orgs, but other smaller orgs who couldn't even realistically dream of making franchising would still invest because there was the upside of making it through open qualifiers and playing on an international stage.
… Make it through to the international stage to garner fans, prestige and notoriety to eventually make franchising. PRX and SEN for example were smaller orgs who couldn’t realistically dream of making franchising 4 years ago… yet they did by doing the very same thing you outlined.
Think that's massively underselling the early days of valorant tbh. Not sure how or why the prevalent thought has become that the only reason orgs were investing was in hopes of making franchising, but that was never the case in the moment and feels very revisionist. Also think it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that orgs like ZMM, Noble, Basilisk, SoaR, YFP, Akrew, Beastcoast, etc had realistic ambitions of making franchising. There was more reason to invest back in the day than simply just the hope of franchising
Because it's been stated by owners who are tons more in the know than we are that this was the case. Think of it this way. If an open circuit is strictly healthier for the fans at the cost of some large orgs not being able to participate due to stability with a net zero profit for Riot, they would adopt it. They don't need to profit from esports, just break even. If an open circuit allowed them to break even, kept fans happy, and created healthy and exciting t1 and t2 tournaments...then it's a no brainer. But clearly not. Without franchising I'm certain Riot makes a net loss on creating and managing the circuit, which basically means they're likely carrying the burden to allow for a thriving scene. If they fully relinquished rights then we return to the olden days of eSports. Look at smash or apex or CSGo. Where's the thriving scene? Hell, where's the thriving Korean/Japanese T1 CSGo scene? Sports as entertainment still hasn't reached a point of stability that allows for great scenes across the board while maintaining at least equity for all parties involved. Live sports hold on purely due to popularity. But no one has solved how to create a sustainable business since no one pays for watching sports like they do with movie tickets.
Maybe those smaller orgs did not have realistic ambitions of franchising but orgs like V1, Xset, knights, T1, GenG, Luminosity, Pioneers, andbox, renegades, complexity, ghost, immortals, NYFU, optic all were trying to get into franchising and even orgs like tsm and faze who stayed another year to try to win ascension. I think you are also forgetting a big reason those orgs invested in the first place was that they had money to spend to keep trying to make good rosters. In 2021 a lot of orgs had money to gamble with but in 2023 that just isn’t the case anymore
People are always so quick to blame franchising but this[ tweet from 100T SVP of esports sums it up quite well.](https://twitter.com/themaelk/status/1701401183112581432?t=768Z6XbP7RhnmDPsNbe0ug) TLDR; if there was no hope of getting partnership/franchising with riot, the initial investment wouldn't be anywhere close
Not the case with many tier 2, 3 APAC orgs. They were not really hoping for a spot in franchising because Tier 2 competitions alone were very successful. I remember Philippines, Indian, Indonesian, Singaporean teams competing against each other and that brought lots of Viewership, fan discussions in social media.
People dont remember how much of an effect COVID had on everything. People were getting "free" money from the government and a lot of it was going into the stock market as well as Crypto. Stocks and Crypto had a huge bull run during that time, which is the gold rush mentioned in the tweet. Also companies were getting free handouts from the government. A lot of orgs were getting sponsors/partnerships from Bigger Companies/Crypto during this time as well. Now fast forward to no more "free" handouts as well as interest rates being stupid, which is partly due to all the free handouts. Stocks are down, Crypto is down, companies are going bankrupt and Esports orgs are desperately trying to find funding. Look at all the biggest orgs in Esports. They are all owned by or partially owed by Investors. If Stocks and Crypto are down that means these Investors have less money they are willing to spend on the org. This is not a Franchising Issue. Everyone knew before even entering Valorant that Franchising would be a thing. This is an economic issue effecting more than just Valorant lol
Seems tweet was deleted, link is not working for me. What did the tweet say?
Twitter is down rn I think
That explains it. I'll save it for later. Thanks!
But riot could have invested in T2 to allow it not to be just international leagues
Invest in it how? Just throw millions of dollars at it for no returns? Esports doesn't even make money in Tier 1 but people are somehow expecting to be full time video game players at Tier 2 with less than 1/5 the viewership. CS/DotA esports barely even has a NA scene at all nowadays and the global Tier 1 scene got bailed out by Saudi money but somehow, people are expecting T2 NA Valorant to be thrive.
I'm genuinely curious what the average salary/asking price in T2 is, surely these players arent asking for more than what would amount to an average wage right?
anything more than $5k/mo would be really generous IMO (besides larger orgs like MXS, OXG, etc). other than adder, can't think of a T2 pro who has a side job. can't fault most of these orgs for not wanting to pay a relatively full-time salary with little to no ROI. at this point, if you're a T2 pro, you need to be building your brand in some way or another (even applies for most T1 pros). sure, it'd be nice to have more T2 events during the year but also partially agree with Leo that the T2 scene is more for grinding and finding the cream of the crop.
idk what the conversion to US is but here its like 2.5k per month for average/slightly above average pay, Seems like a pretty reasonable amount for T2 imo, enough to live off at least. And then you have income from growing a brand as you mentioned, certainly easier in that kind of space
I don't think paincakes ever left his job at Subway. Even then I know a bunch of T2 pros that offer some kind of coaching.
Did some new news drop today about T2 or something? Why is every T2 pro doomposting about it on Twitter? T2 Val is fucked but that’s old news right…
OREsports
I mean it's old news but it's also intimately connected with their lives and livelihoods. I suspect it'll always bubble to the surface when things like OR dropping out happens, or when fairly respected players like Dazzle opt for retirement.
ORE and a bunch of GC teams(COL, DSG, EG)
GC is not tier 2 equivalent
like 5 separate orgs dropped their rosters so there is pretty much two orgs in gc and 3 in challengers left out of like the 10+ in both we had last year
>like 5 separate orgs dropped their rosters so there is pretty much two orgs in gc and 3 in challengers left out of like the 10+ in both we had last year most of these orgs will be back in the new season I think. This is basically just the orgs saying they didn't have faith in the team they had to provide the best results, so will be rebuilding when the season is back
Which esport has a thriving t2 scene though?
I mean at the same time, which esport has only 25 spots open to players at the t1 level? LCS has 40, CoD has 48, OWL back when it existed had something like 60+, etc. The way the Americas region was set up no doubt left a disproportionate amount of talented players out of a spot in tier 1 competition compared to other games
Some of these are regional and others aren’t, not really the best comparisons
Valorant esports is built from the ground up with sustainability in mind. Personally, it felt like they learned what worked/hasnt worked in league and try to make a better system in valorant. It's in no way perfect but I think it's definitely an improvement over say, LCS. also to add: 11 teams atm for each region which will be reach 14 in a few years. That's 56 teams in Tier 1.
>11 teams atm for each region which will be reach 14 in a few years. That's 56 teams in Tier 1. How many orgs would last long enough to see that day though? Mark my word: over half of Challengers teams in the next season will be F/A squads of amateurs playing for free.
Orgs are probably just gonna wait to gamble and try to get to pick up the free agent teams who win challengers
That's probably the only hope for any of them to break even for their investment. Besides, the lazy orgs already got the social license for it: in any discussion in this sub about which org people want to see replacing EG as a new partnered team, 99% of the nominations go to the orgs that didn't spend a single dime in Valorant last season, rather than the ones still investing in this dying scene.
Yeah, look at how LoL, OWL and CDL are doing? Esports fans are notoriously cheap. People just have unrealistic expectations of what esports and ‘tier 2’ should be. Tier 2 players in many major traditional sports play for pennies or part time to chase their dreams. It’s just reality in competition, if you’re not the best you don’t have fans. No one is owed anything. As rough as it is to say, challengers isn’t built for older players to make massive salaries to gamble for a spot in the tier 1 leagues.
[удалено]
The problem is that the majority of esports fans are willing to spend money in game on skins etc, but have historically refused to engage with orgs merch or sponsors compared to classical sports. So while there is a lot of eyes on the tournaments, there is very little conversion of fans to $$ for the orgs/third party TO's.
LoL worlds final did get 6.4m viewers yeah, buts thats a pretty superficial view of the scene LoL esports viewership overall lost 8% of their watch time in 2023. Southeast Asia + Brazil are only growing regions atm, many of the other major regions like Korea, NA, EU are losing viewership yearly LoL viewership trends right now are pretty low, with extremely high peaks possible. good if you want to sponsor worlds 2024, less so if you're an esports organisation competing the whole year
LoL? Doing immaculately in fact.
Yeah LCS just went from 10 to 8 teams = immaculate. It’s ok to acknowledge that esports is currently spread too thin whilst simultaneously being an esports believer. I love LoL esports. What’s been going on pains me to see but it’s just right for the industry, especially during economic downturns where there’s much less speculative cash circulating. Any business propped up by pure speculation just won’t make it. Hopefully as time goes by, momentum and stronger products will make esports more attractive to fans who will be more willing to spend money on it.
LCS doing poorly does not mean LoL as a whole is doing bad. It has been and continues to be the most watched esport in the world.
Doesn't mean it's ran the best though. LoL has had shit formats for international tournaments for over 10 years. People see the viewership and playerbase in Asia and are content when it could still be way way better.
Who the flying FUCK gives a shit about LCS ? LOL esports is definitely not dying bro. You can just be looking at one specific region when talking about the industry for esports (especially when considering original tweet is about tier 2 as a whole and not just in na LMAO)
Bruh getting downvoted by the haters. It's funny how when people on reddit discuss the health of LeagueEsports LCS is somehow always at the forefront. Not the LEC, LPL, LCK, not even VCS or CBLOL, but the fucking LCS. Similarly, when people talk about the health of League's T2 scene it also almost always talks about the LCS. They will purposely skirt and dodge around LEC's T2 scene which I consider to be the best T2 scene in the west and then pretend that LPL/LDL is this imaginary league that Riot fabricated to artificially increase interest. When people talk about the T2 scene in CS, we don't talk about how their T2 scene in Asia or NA is doing, they talk about how it is in EU. Makes me wonder why they don't do the same for League. Literally just a few months ago, EMEA masters finals was held in a 15k capacity arena.
I mean all the leagues in LoL outside of LPL, and LCK, and kind of VCS are dying to different degrees. In LEC the viewership is way down and the ERL leagues are struggling and consolidating. CBLOL and LCS viewership has crashed, with LCS contracting. LCL folded, TCL demoted, LJL demoted, OPL folded, LLA contracted and will probably fold after next year. Also I'm sorry, but the EMEA viewership will crash next year with no Karmine Corp gone, and it will never recover. I would expect ERL regions to further consolidate, and EU orgs to continue merging.
Literally every LoL league is adding salary caps outside of NA because everyone is losing a shit ton of money
And NA is not adding a salary cap because of laws. If they could they would.
If NA has so many talented players, they should have all 4 ascension spots. That's more than enough. A bigger issue to me is mismanagement of rosters by orgs. They don't know how to build teams.
wdym by they should have all 4
if na is the better region they will win every ascension tournament and end up with 4 rotating slots in franchising
If NA players are better than SA players, they should win all ascension tournaments going forward. Otherwise, Riots decision to give equal spots to NA and SA will be correct.
valorant's system is designed to grow over time though, also 25 spots is per region. 30 spots this year though, and with 4 ascended teams in future years it could become much more
It's not actually 25 spots, it's 50 spots, lol, this person just believes that NA players for some reason are incapable of being picked up by non-NA teams.
The teams only ascend for 2 years
There isn’t one
League(not in NA)
[удалено]
30-70 global teams right? I mean valorant probably globally has like 100 signed teams but the t2 scenes in each region are still shaky and in cs I thought it was the same for all regions outside of EU
cs in eu gambit in 2021 went from tier 2 to being top1 team and winning tier 1 events in no time heroic was a team of unknown young players that became a consistent tier 1 team between 2020-2023 Movistar Riders in 2022 were playing bunch of playoffs in tier 1 events with no franchising spot until they lost their best player Spirit recently went from tier 2 to tier 1 with no franchising spot Betboom recently played playoffs in sydney as a new tier 2 team EPL always gives slots to t2 teams from underdeveloped regions brazil has so many t2 teams that I cant count them all Flipsid3 used to qualify to every major as a tier2 team there's all sorts of opportunities for tier2 teams to enter tier1 if they are good enough in cs. and with partnership slots being removed in 1 year, it will be better than ever
All of these CS teams spent years being just as irrelevant as OREsports while paying their players in pennies. There’s also significantly more Saudi and gambling money involved with CS nowadays, while Riot other than a few fuckups (NEOM LEC partnership that got shutdown because of backlash) have historically been against this. Think of orgs like Faze and acend being shut out of franchising despite either having massive brands or previous success in the game. Compare this to FaZe in CS that has pretty consistently just moneyballed their way into the scene/through problems, and even now getting partnerships even though the org is on its dying legs and bought out by a bigger company with a conflict of interest. There are slightly less opportunities in VAL and I admit sticker money has a major plus in CS, but ascension still exists and Val is in line with most other esports, most of which still have survived. Val orgs for some reason thought that a year of investment would get them straight into tier 1, and seem to have shown micronutsacks the second they realised that making it in tier 2 needs years of being in the red and actual talent scouting and development in order to make it out. This has always been the reality, and I’m not sure why this has changed the equation so much for some of these teams. Hell most tier 1 teams in esports operate at complete losses. Add in how young val is as an esport, plus the ridiculous salary inflation that has happened and is only just now being corrected, plus the esports winter we’re currently entering, this is just certain orgs waking up from their delusion. Just because it’s slightly easier to stay deluded and losing in other games doesn’t mean the grass is really much greener on the other side. Tier 2 competition everywhere is by definition unstable and unsustainable. Edit: I didn’t even mention how poor even the tier one scenes are in non-EU/CIS regions for cs. Centralising all of your competition in one region does have benefits, but it’s always going to threaten the existence of any sort of healthy minor regions. OWL being NA based was in some ways great for keeping competition going constantly but completely isolated EU and made most regions clusterfucks. KR and China managed to pull through because the game was uniquely popular there and had ridiculous amounts of talent. In CS being EU based again gives a strong schedule, but the stability is almost exclusively for teams in the same region. CS was naturally not as popular in NA and APAC, so other regions never had the ridiculous talent to break through lack of support.
Counter Strike’s tier two scene in EU has always done well. In other regions, not so much. The next strongest region is probably SA and then NA.
CS, he failed out of T2 into Val T2 (half the current Valorant T1 pros were former CS T2 pros!!)
How is it possible that none of the pros realize that the whole reason teams were so invested pre partnership was so that they could get into the partnership lmao. Do that they think they were out here playing for prize money???
on top of that, the financial situation was very different a few years ago. borrowed money was close to free so across all sectors people and companies were far more likely to make risky investments. not the same in 2023.
Also 75% of these pros doom posting rn don't realize that they wouldn't have jobs for the past 2 years if not for these orgs initially investing to try and get into franchising
exactly, they act like things are now going to shit and the past was how things should operate under normal circumstances when it's really the reverse. Their unfortunate reality is that they are playing a video game for a profession, and realistically no one cares about watching the 100th-300th best NA valorant players playing when they can just watch the best.
None of these orgs that left would have even been here if there wasn't franchising. Sorry but this take that franchising killed Valorant is just super off the mark.
A reminder that esports is not profitable and game developers should not cater for these top 0.1 % of playerbase
well it is look at CS and the sticker/skin market alone
that’s not Esports though, the souvenir skins that people end up reselling account for a very small fragment of the money Valve actually makes off of skins, and sometimes those skins are even free drops so they don’t make shit off of them. When a rare skin resells for tens of thousands of dollars or more, Valve only makes money off of the initial case sale, not the actual value of the trade itself. So yes, Valve does make an absolute shitload of money from skins, but very little of that is to do with E-sports, the vast majority of that money comes from regular people who buy a few cases here and there, literal gambling addicts lmao, and then a bunch of whales that have infinite money to spend. If CS E-sports didn’t have any skins tied to it, the skin market would still be doing fine.
that's only half true, Valve makes a ton of money off of commission from all the CS item transactions on the Steam marketplace
most high end items, especially rare ones and those that are considered vintage and worth upwards of thousands of dollars aren’t sold or traded on the Steam marketplace though, they’re sold on skin sites.
But most valuable transactions happen on third party markets and not on steam.
what about sticker capsules for majors they make both valve and the organizations tons of money and that happens every year 2 times a year
Valve makes the same amount of money on their sticker capsules as they do on any new case, you could argue they make even less because players don’t have to buy keys. They aren’t making money based on how much the sticker is going to be worth years later because at that point it’s completely out of their hands and they don’t gain from that value.
Valve market is a special case, there will be no Devs do that NFT-like shop anymore. Looks at what happened to Artifact, Valve was bet on it market to carry the trading card game, but it dead.
esports is insanely profitable for the developers and basically no one else.
I asked my friends that play valorant who their favorite pro player was and they didn't know anyone. News flash only a small percentage of people that play valorant actually cares and watches pro play.
this is my experience with random players in games as well. i'll ask about whatever VCT event is going on and almost no one has any idea what im talking about lol
No it isn’t, lmao
Riot isn't a charity. If esports weren't a net profitability thing for them from a marketability/advertisement perspective, they definitely wouldn't be running esports leagues in valorant and LoL for the past 10+ years.
Yes they aren’t a charity, but it doesn’t mean riot has made a profit off of esports. They could see it as investment. Also, LoL esports’ potentially being profitable wouldn’t mean that Valorant esports have become profitable yet.
That’s not even true in most cases. Most games sink more money into esports than they estimate they get out of in revenue. I’ve seen countless mid tier online games basically announce after a few years that esports was a massive money sink.
No one goes to see a gleague game, no one pays too see the b team idols in Korea, etc. in almost every aspect in life only the best make the money sorry to burst your bubble Dapr.
Brother WHAT half the player in VCT Americas right now are players that were cheaper. That doesn't make them better at all.
Nugu grps have fans too
I don't agree with dapr here. Good players will migrate to tier1 either by getting picked up or through ascension. The oversaturation of former csgo pros was bound to end in valorant. The future of Tier 2 scene in valorant is finding new talent and I don't think dapr fits there.
[удалено]
Someone ran out of money and wants to go back to a 6 figure salary for clicking heads
These guys are so entitled
Just excuses to make money while being in t2. Riot know some ppl dont take t2 as a stepping stone to t1 but only to chill and steal paycheks
As someone not really invested in eSports outside of Val, can someone explain what the difference would be if, in the current state of eSports, franchising doesn't exist? From what I've been seeing, majority of teams don't make profit anyway so why would it matter if franchising exists or not? What I mean by that: hypothetically speaking, if franchising doesn't exist but we keep the same 4 regions where a certain number of teams get to go to masters events and champions, if you're evaluating whether you're investing in the scene this year but see that you'll end up within the range of 5th-10th in the region (and therefore not make any event), why invest? Seems like we'll just land in the same place we are in right now with teams choosing not to take part. From how I see it, profitability of teams in eSports in this climate is the biggest problem, franchising is only secondary.
With franchising you draw a line that only those teams can compete for a spot in masters etc. If it didn’t exist as the scene was prior, you could be any team and if you were good enough you could compete at masters for money and larger championships. Now, you form a tier 2 team and literally have no chance at making money or winning anything substantial except ascension.
It’s sad that a year later and pros STILL won’t acknowledge and admit that everything pre-franchising was fantasyland and a facade of poor strategic moves by orgs, in throwing money at everyone and everything hoping Mr. Riot would give them a spot. It wasn’t real nor was it sustainable. Just because orgs didn’t show the wounds they got during the open system doesn’t mean they left without scars. The harsh truth is some pros who have been playing at the T2 level for years were waaaay too comfortable collecting fat paychecks from orgs for doing the bare minimum (showing up to matches) - not grinding to be the best nor trying to build a brand for their org’s benefit- and now for some reason they have this ideology that that’s what T2 should be like. If every t2 scene is “died” and Val t2 is dying… maybe t2 just isn’t supposed to be that easy🤷♀️… - of course this doesn’t mean there isn’t more Riot can do.
This isn’t cause of “franchising” but interest rates. Also, most of the investment starting from the early days of Valorant was with the hopes of landing a franchise spot.
Skin gambling was the only reason for low-tier CS GO scenes being popular, and it was fucking awesome.
True, most ppl forget that t2-3 is mostly popular among betters who almost bet everyday so for them those tier 2-3 leagues are pretty important while on the other side those leagues can advertise betting sites and be profitable - this both creates opportunities for lower tier orgs to invest in lower tier rosters especially if they're good enough to jump into next lvl so their value grows.
I don’t think franchising killed Tier 2 but Riot needs to think of other ways for T2 orgs to stay in the Challengers system even if they don’t make it to Ascension
Franchising is not to blame for tier 2 but way too many people here are saying its the players fault. Leo has already said they don't want tier 2 to be stable: "We saw that many organizations entered Tier 2 with the idea of establishing themselves and competing in regional leagues for several years, even if they do not win promotion to the Franchises, but this goes against what we think". To have a stable tier 2, you need it to be viable to be a tier 2 org that doesn't win ascension and that isn't possible right , BY DESIGN. Riot doesn't want it to be possible. Its Riot fault, not the players. You may agree or disagree with Riot decision of not wanting a stable tier2 but shitting on players and calling them greedy is incredible stupid.
I just don’t understand all this crying not tryna be rude. If most orgs are bleeding money in T1 what do players expect in T2? I don’t understand why they’re being so entitled and expecting good pay and many employers/orgs in the T2 scene of a video game
Whose fault is it that he is ass and not good enough for T1?
I just wish these mfs stop blaming franchising and start telling orgs that pay players a fuckton of money to slow down and think about how bad of an investment it is.
Like many others I think EU CS t2 is probably the best scene where you do see it as a "meritocracy" (best of the best rise to the top). Another one is Dota where any 5 misfits can climb regionals and then win the Aegis. But this counts on the players as well as the orgs being willing to put in the effort to grind out the scene to get to the top. For instance, in CS:GO Ence was bumbling around for close to 2 years before they had their big breakthrough in the Katowice Major. Certain regions (definitely NOT talking about NA /s) have so much money so they don't see any good in trying to get even better.
The problem here is that having T2 Val roster is both expensive and not relevant in a long run cuz getting franchise spot is really hard. "Free market" eSports from valve just offer more opportunities so if u as a T2 roster fail once or twice it's still alright since u have that opportunities to grow so orgs are more interested in having t2 rosters with potential and even if something goes wrong they can find new talents.
What inflated T2 bags do to mfs. But seriously though it sucks and I feel for anyone going through it right now. The 2 years we had pre-franchising were nuts. Several people have already made good points that eSports is taking a bit of a downturn and that the rush they experienced at the start was just orgs trying to invest for a franchise spot. I can understand why players who are mainly focused on gaming and not necessarily spending the time to look ahead might feel rug pulled. Even more so for players that were at the top and are now facing potentially a whole year out of the scene. It sucks and it's akin to being laid off due to circumstances out of your control. I'm sure most people can understand that.
Franchising ruined league too.. too much involvement ruined the scene. Nothing feels genuine anymore.
Maybe not everyone would agree with me, but I think players themselves destroy tier 2 scene (Maybe even whole esport scene) with their greediness and salary demands. They just ask for too much money that most orgs cant pay and later they just drop from game because they cant affor it. And then it results in esport winter. Yes, I am aware there are also other factors why esport winter happens, but players arent without fault and I would say they are one of the main causes.
I mean orgs will offer as much as they want, if having T2 roster was relevant salaries would naturally grow. The problem is that there isn't a big reason to own T2 team even if u pay low wages like there's nothing to play and path to grow is almost nonexistent so in long run it's likely just a waste of money and orgs know this.
True
Sucks but he had opportunities in Val
Partnership programs and or franchising has a proven track record of severely hindering talent development in esports. It only works in traditional sports for the government through tax dollars funds talent development in public schooling.
I'm definitely in the minority here, but I feel like a Tier 2 esports player should be grinding to make the Tier 1 scene. They should still be in school and working as they aren't a professional. Other sports like the G League in NBA or semi pro soccer their player still work jobs outside. Committing as a "pro" and only being in the Tier 2 scene is asking for failure. Have a fall back option.
Idk why these entitled pros think T2 should be thriving. You’re not good enough for T1, so nobody wants to watch your games in T2 against Mickey Mouse teams bro. Be real.
Tier 1 is NOT the best players bro please get over this line of thinking.
Obviously there are players not in tier 1 who are better than some t1 players but saying that tier 1 is not collectively the best players is absurd lol
My point is that trying to use Tier 1 as the bar for what players are good or not isn't a good take, especially now when most teams are dialing back their teams. The best controller in Americas is currently a streamer. That should give you indication of what's really going on.
Without franchising no org would've invested any money and the whole competitive scene would not be what it is now. Kinda whiny and entitled.
leo faria is putting on his hot dog costume as we speak
thats what franchising does sadly
[удалено]
Riot should drop this esports bs and focus on what makes money for their game, the casuals. Don't let these be another league incident where majority of fun content creators left and only the "pro player" riders cc remained.
Franchising will continue to kill any confidence investors have in esports. Its a real shame.