Magic: The Gathering

Board Games
21

Nobody is forcing these people to make a living by playing Magic. I don’t buy it. If they want to spend full-time hours because that’s what it takes to be the best in the world… that’s on them? Congrats you are number one at Magic now. If that carries such prestige that it was worthwhile, hope it lands you all that sponsorship money.

Golf and tennis are hard comparisons because there is a whole industry around them. Fees to play. Many equipment manufacturers, etc. With Magic, it’s all WotC aside from sleeves, playmats, and deckboxes. If WotC does a shit job promoting its own pro tour, and fails to use it as an effective marketing tool, then that’s their own failure.

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22

A company with many moneys encourages people to do a thing, pays people to do that thing, and profits from people doing that thing. That thing being playing competitive M:tG for a living. They have a pro tour. They call it the PRO tourn. They actively market the idea to players that this is an achievable goal. Play a card game as your job. This job can not be accomplished by playing as a hobby. It requires full time work. All full time work should be compensated with a true living wage. Someone doing full time work for a company, and not making a living wage, has every right to complain.

The WotC employees in charge of like, figuring out how many cards to print, probably make more money and work less hard than the pro M:tG players. That’s some bullshit.

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23

To Matt’s point, maybe they should try a different game then :wink:

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24

One prominent player seems to be on the verge of doing just that. Hence, the news.

25

Honestly I’d compare magic to the professional chess scene before I’d compare it to PGA. Here’s the thing about golf: No one holds the specific copyright on Golf Clubs. Sure, a company can have a specific process to making its clubs, but there’s no one company who hold the monopoly on 5 Irons. So have all of these golf companies who want to sell their clubs and bags and they’ll sponsor golfers and buy tv ads during tournaments.

Magic… Doesn’t have that base of money to pull from. You have card sleeve and card box manufacturers, that’s about it.

At least with PC-based E-Sports you have companies like Dell, HP, AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA using it as a platform to sell more product.

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26

Golf has many non-golf sponsors.

How many of those are companies that self golf stuff?

I see the same thing happening with all the competitive tabletop games as well as most of the eSports. The companies running the games aren’t putting in the full investment required to make the competitive game a big deal. They dip the toe in the water, declare it a failure, and cut back.

I can’t say it will definitely work if you jump in the pool, but there’s no other way to find out. You have to invest big, take a big risk. You can’t get more people on board without buying a bigger boat first. It’s even OK to grow gradually, but most seem to stop trying after growing to a particular size. Which would be fine if they just didn’t promote being a professional at the game as a legitimate career path.

27

The Beer and Liquor companies could be considered “Golf Stuff”. However a lot of these sponsors are here because Golf has an established Network/Cable presence. The M:TG tournament would have to be hosted on Nick or Disney channel (and then streamed to Twitch and/or Youtube) for that kind of ad revenue.

28

That’s because golf has a lot of people who are interested in it to attract those sponsors, especially compared to MtG. MtG and even e-sports isn’t quite there yet compared to golf. They may never get quite there compared to golf for whatever reason. They are currently both niche sports, if you will, compared to golf, though e-sports is growing.

Heck, just about every salesman for a non-trivial-sized company plays golf. Business deals are often conducted on golf courses. Some business schools, such as MIT’s, even have a “Business Golf” course on how to do deals while playing golf.

Even outside of the “suit” world, golf is well-known and well-established. How many people know who Tiger Woods is, for example? Compare that to how many people know who the top e-sports player or MtG player is?

29

I agree with everything you just said, so I say this with love. Making fun of Sloan Business is like… a robust and weathered MIT tradition. Many a room full of drunk CS kids sit around and make fun of that business golf course.

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30

LOL, nothing wrong with that. If I had gotten into/attended MIT (I did apply but wasn’t accepted), I probably would’ve joked about it myself, although I may have also have taken that class as an elective if possible (my mom for years had told me I should learn to play golf as it may be good for my career. While it hasn’t made a difference in my career, I did take some basic golf lessons and it’s actually a pretty fun game.).

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31

There are hundreds of companies producing supplies and thousands upon thousands selling products and hosting events. I’d venture to say that almost any area has multiple stores hosting magic events for every golf course. It’s not in the same boat as far as revenue but it’s not like there isn’t a huge industry built around magic.

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32

Revenue is king. It’s revenue that allows sponsors, product manufacturers, etc., to pay participants the big bucks.

Game stores are almost always little mom and pop shops that probably make, at best, the equivalent of a middle-class income in profit. People don’t start game stores because they hope to get rich off of them – they do it because they are really into gaming and hope to just make a decent living off of them.

Meanwhile, well-run golf courses probably take in dozens of game stores’ worth of revenue over any given year – especially if they are well-established courses with a high-end clientele. A successful private golf course easily pulls in several thousand dollars per year per customer in membership fees alone, and that doesn’t count additional revenue from greens fees, cart rental, food and drink at the 19th hole, and special event hosting like weddings and proms. They’re not even in the same ballpark when it comes to revenue.

33

It matters more where the money actually goes than how much there is. Sports don’t have a centralized entity that captures the percentage of the revenue that a game like magic does. Cards only come from Hasbro. Magic has grown significantly since 2014 when it was bringing in a quarter of a billion dollars for Hasbro. Most of golfs money just goes into the coffers of a single club or equipment company. A better comparison would be the PGA tour and the percentage it pays its players (about 12%). 12% is a far cry from the ~50% enjoyed by both the NFL and NBA but Hasbro still has pro tours for a reason. There’s a reason they increased the number of them next year to six even though it costs them a lot more than the $250,000 prize purse to put on a tournament across the country or around the world. It’s an invaluable promotion for them and even when they gave out more money the game was much, much smaller.

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12% of a quarter of a billion dollars is $30 million. With that amount of money, you should be able to have a lot more than 20 people able to play the game full time. About 100 would be reasonable.

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It’s even worse than that now because no one can be reliably full time through prize money alone. The people that are full time are doing so through supplemental income like writing. Without the writing they could never live on the prize money alone.

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12% of $30 million divided by 100 comes to $36,000. I guess that’s enough for someone to play the game full time, especially if you live in a cheaper part of the country. You’re not going to get rich playing MtG, though.

Also, keep in mind the PGA Tour exists to do one thing: promote golf. Every investment it makes is purely to promote golf. It’s also, believe it or not, structured as a non-profit. All net proceeds from tournaments after purses are paid out are actually donated back to the communities. That gives it all sorts of interesting tax benefits as well as helping encourage sponsorships as at least part of the money used to sponsor a PGA Tour event can be considered a charitable donation. The people who work the courses for the tournaments are by and large volunteers as a result of this charitable organization… and the tour does actually give a healthy amount of money to charity (Around $1 billion from 1997 to 2011: Beyond Tiger).

Hasbro is a for-profit entity that has to pay its employees, etc. As a result, its expense structure is certainly higher than the PGA Tour’s, let alone its tax obligations. When it comes to spending money on what to promote, Hasbro needs to choose between My Little Pony/Transformers/etc. and MtG (oversimplification, I know).

Therefore, it’s really not an apple-to-apples comparison.

I mean, if we’re going to run the numbers, let’s take a look at Hasbro’s overall numbers for 2017: https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-full-year-and-fourth-quarter-2017-financial

Hasbro Gaming, which includes MtG and other games, such as Monopoly, brought in a revenue of $893 million in 2017. That sounds really healthy, but it’s a lot smaller than the revenue they get for for their mainline brands (My Little Pony, Transformers, etc.) as well as all their other products. In short, only about 17% of their revenue came from gaming, and that includes all gaming, not just MtG. Given that MtG is a small drop in the bucket compared to the money it makes in its own franchise toy lines, it makes sense for them to pump more money into those than MtG. In fact, Hasbro’s profit for 2018 comes it at roughly equal to their revenue on gaming at about $835 million. I don’t have their full SEC report in front of me, so I don’t know how much it breaks down, but let’s assume since 17% of their revenue was from gaming, so was 17% of their profit, or about $141.95 million. Of course, a lot less than that would be from MtG since MtG is only a part of their gaming revenue (Monopoly, believe it or not, still brings in a ton of money for them).

37

If you want to have competitive gaming to promote your product to competitive gamers you can do that for very cheap. FFG does it with all their games. They never give cash prizes. They seem to actively work hard to make it so nobody can play their games in a professional capacity.

If you want to advertise that it is possible to play your game as a profession, then it needs to be true to a reasonable extent. If only the world champion can afford to live off the game, that’s a problem. M:tG has a thing that is actually called the pro tour. Everyone on that pro tour should be making a living wage. If not, then they have no right to call it a pro tour. They have no right to suggest to people that being a M:tG is an attainable or worthwhile career goal. They have no right telling people they should play this game as their primary activity to the exclusion of other professional endeavors.

If they can’t afford to have a reasonable number of people play the game professional, that’s fine. Just shut up then and don’t tell people to try to do so.

38

Eh, there are professional poker players too, but they don’t get paid based on anything but their winnings. I think pro poker is closer to pro M:tG than pro golf or any other pro sport. And even then, the advice to become a pro poker player can be summed up by saying:

  1. Save up enough to have a dedicated poker bankroll before going pro so that you hopefully won’t go broke while playing.
  2. Don’t do it because you intend to make a living off of it. Do it because you love the game.

To be fair, when I look at various “pro” gaming tournaments, I don’t view them as something you do to make a living full-time, unless you manage to attend enough of them and are good enough to perform solidly in the money. Again, kind of like pro poker. The various pro poker tournaments don’t pay players anything other than their winnings, for example. M:tG tournaments are probably run in a similar manner as best as I can tell. I don’t see pro poker tournaments claiming that they are a viable way to make a living even if you’re good enough to do so. For that matter, I don’t see anything on the official M:tG pro tour website saying anything along those lines either. Even most pro poker players make most of their money outside of tournaments, instead going to their local casinos, playing online, etc., outside of tournament play. The folks you see in Twitch poker streaming or TV or whatever are only the cream of the crop of poker players and not the daily grinder who spends all day on PartyPoker.net and all weekends at Foxwoods.

People are always trying to make a living doing something non-traditional that lets them set their own schedules, etc. I’m not going to hold anything against them for that, whether it’s pro poker, day trading, pro M:tG, or whatever else. However, if it’s not economically viable, maybe the problem is that you made a poor economic decision and not that the people organizing these things aren’t paying you enough.

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It’s called the PRO TOUR. Maybe you have a misunderstanding of what PRO means. PRO means you get paid and it’s your job. You are a professional, and not an amateur.

Yeah, a pro poker player makes only money from the winnings, but those winnings are big enough that it is viable if you are good. There aren’t one, but many, different organizations that promote pro poker as a viable career path, but none of them are lying. If you are good enough, you will be very wealthy.

There is one organization promoting Magic as a viable professional career, but it is not, even for the best players.

40

Okay, it’s hard to argue against the notion of having “pro” in the name being at least somewhat problematic. We could get into a fuzzy gray area as to whether or not you can be a “professional” at something even if it’s not your sole source if income, so long as it’s still one source of income. I’m in the “part-time pros are still pros” camp, but it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on.

I don’t know of any organizations that promote poker as a viable career path. There are multiple organizations that pay you if you’re good at poker, but I can’t name a single one that promotes it as a career. As I said, most pro poker players are self-professed pros who play online for cash or at their local casinos on a regular basis and use that to make their living. The various pro poker “tours” that exist are tours in that they visit casinos all over the world but they don’t necessarily have a regular group of players that follow them around as part of their tour. In fact, anyone who can pay the minimum buy-in to participate in any of their events can in fact play in them. That’s how you sometimes have a relative no-name at the final table of these events: someone managed to get the cash to buy in and via tremendous luck, newly discovered skill, or some combination thereof ended up at the final table. Very few players actually make money at the big tournaments.

Maybe the problem is that there is only one organization promoting Magic. If there were numerous organizations hosting tournaments, etc., much like in the poker world, then maybe it could be a viable full-time career as opposed to merely a part-time one. As I said, most poker players don’t make their money at just the handful of tournaments that exist. They make it in the daily grind of playing online and at local casinos. Hypothetically, this would require online pay-to-enter M:tG tournaments as well as pay-to-enter local tournaments at game shops, etc. I honestly don’t know how viable either of these would be.