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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

I play pinball on a competitive scale. It's great fun and it's internationally ranked (IFPA). We get toghether, and battle on machine that takes a lot of skills and knowledge to master. Seriously, the silver ball and physics bring a world of constant chaos.

E-sports seems like a bad joke that went on for too long. It goes to show that if you pump enough money into something, it will become a thing. The old saying "if you strap enough rockets to a pig, it will fly!" is basically it.

I hope not every 'sport' or 'hobby' come to that level, as it brings so much sadness and fake happiness in competition.

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It goes to show that if you pump enough money into something, it will become a thing.

Who do you think is pumping money into e-sports? The biggest event last year, The International 2017, had $24.7M prize pool. The first place prize was $10M -- $2M per player. The prize pool was funded by the fans themselves -- the organizing company started with putting $1.6M with their own cash, and the remaining $23M was collected from Dota 2 fans, who bought Battle Pass and various other items associated with it. In fact, only 25% of battle pass revenue went into prize pool -- this means that fans were spent almost $100M on this, and this doesn't even include the tickets to the actual event. This is real business with real revenues, not some fake bullshit pumped by some arcane wealth.

Maybe I'm just misinterpreting what you're writing but are you really suggesting pinball is a more deserving sport than e-sports? That doesn't exactly feel like a convincing argument.

If you're saying "I don't understand why League is big and Pinball isn't". Well, that's popularity.

More importantly - who cares what other people like? If you don't like it, you don't have to jump in screaming "but this is baaaaaad!"

No what I'm saying is pumping too much money in a e-sport/hobby is bad.

Could you elaborate on how/why you view it as "bad"?

From my POV this is a "good" thing.

E-sports get a lot of eyeballs (views). More eyeballs (views) = more endorsement due to increased audience.

Personally, I'm an advocate for e-sports because I enjoy playing games & watching people compete at them especially at the elite level.

Pumping money into esports is a core part of their business model. Its their advertising budget and more importantly seeing really good players makes perhaps burnt out players play the game some more because it makes then excited about the game again, and eventually buy their in game items.

This seems really out of touch with the market and reality in general. Esports isn't a thing because infinite money made it so - it's manifested from the competitive nature of the people involved with it. I know it sounds a bit cliche, but it's just Sports. Changing the arena of battle or the physical machinations doesn't make it any less of a competitive, skilled atmosphere where objectives drive conquest. This particular dismissive nature of thinking is just backwards and wrong.

LoL takes a lot of skills and knowledge and experience to master, too. And I don't think it's accurate to imply that League of Legends owes its popularity as an e-sport to financing. Sure, it was a factor in its success, but remember how e-sports was regarded as utterly ridiculous when it first started being televised?

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