A decade ago, esports firms were largely concerned with their survival, not their future. In some ways, pondering the pipeline problem is a luxury for the esports industry. To put it bluntly, someone has to pay for as many hours of practice as possible.īut whose responsibility that is - players, teams, tournaments, or publishers - is an open question.
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And yet finding a way to support them and their training is essential if potential skill held in every player is to be actualized into professional skill. The hard part is the middle, where we find those who are training to become professionals but who do not produce much value for the teams and tournaments that might otherwise support them - that is, the pipeline to pro. At the base, most people are playing for fun and don’t need (or expect) compensation at the top are professionals, who create plenty of value on their own.
When it comes to making that system sustainable over time, the top and the bottom of the pyramid are the easy part. As players rise through the ranks, skill inheres in them, making it possible to separate, in the warm glow of stadium lights, the good from the great, the great from elite, and the elite from the legends.
01% of players that an (e)sport needs to shine requires a kind of pyramid: millions of casual players, thousands of competitive ones, hundreds of elites, and a precious few superstars. So finding - or, really, producing - that top. Rather, competitive gaming is built on the goal of being better than someone else, meaning that esports dramatizes accumulated skill in ways that most careers do not. This is because succeeding in esports, like all sports, is not simply about meeting accreditation standards (e.g., passing the state bar). The pipeline problem is felt with particular intensity in professional gaming. Nursing, sculpting, plumbing, lawyering, aerospace engineering, pastry making, even teaching itself - all of it continues to exist because a viable skill development pipeline has been built for it. Until the modern era, apprenticeships largely served this function these days, student debt does much the same, placing the financial burden (and risk) of training onto individuals rather than employers or society at large. Skill-building is time-consuming and expensive, and yet it must take place in order for skilled industries to survive.
This is the heart of what’s often called a pipeline problem. If skill demands training, but training itself is not profitable, then who is obligated to support the labor of learning until accumulated skill can start to pay for itself? This presents a quandary for any industry built on skilled labor. Even so, practice rarely has a financial reward. If talent is given, like a gift, then skill is made, which is to say that it is work’s reward. And while the origin of talent - be it God or random genetic flux - is notoriously obscure, the provenance of skill is anything but. By common consensus, mastery rests on two pillars: talent and skill.
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