The Smash 4 Tournament Running Economy

I was reading a tweet yesterday from PG's Suar that showed a pyramid of the "Smash 4 Tournaments Yet-to be Trifecta of Ideals", with Production on top, Attendance on the left, and Profit on the bottom right. This basically is trying to show the core 3 things to strive for when it comes to having a successful Smash tournament. I think it's a very simple way to visualize what a tournament organizer's aspirations should be, but I also think people look at the "Profit" corner in the wrong light. "Profit", in this case, is in regards to the organizations involved with running the events, not the players themselves. And I can promise you, most if not all of these struggle to break even. I'd like to go into this a little, and pardon me if it's structured a little weird, this is based on a series of tweets I made yesterday.



People comparing Smash/Melee to non-FGC major eSports, which have a solid profit margin, miss an important fact: the more financially thriving eSports like League of Legends and DoTA get financially established sponsors/partners. When companies like major computer part manufacturers come in, they are able to drop real money with ease. Smash only really gets a small handful of vendors, but these vendors are generally about as grassroots as Smash itself, and thus don't have the financial reach they could (no offense to any vendor out there, of course). So streamers basically have to rely exclusively on their ad revenue, which is impeded by Adblock users, and Twitch subscribers, which are extremely rare. For example, a little peek behind the curtain, but we got literally zero subscribers from Frostbite, even though it broke records for Smash 4's view count at the time.



And people RUNNING Smash events? All they really get is venue fees to sustain themselves. The venue fee, however, has to be split across paying for venue, paying staff, and much more. Odds are, they really aren't gonna get much *financially*, as they'll be lucky to even break even. Breaking even is basically a BEST case scenario for them, as I've met plenty of TOs that have lost tons of money. One public example I can reference is CEO Dreamland, which wound up losing ~$20,000. You can read his Jebailey's post-mortem in the link, but let me pull the most notable thing in relation to this: "To cover the cost of everything including Stream production, AV, staging, ballroom space, 24 hour security friendlies room, staffing, commentary, hotel rooms for staff etc. really adds up and at the scale I ran the event about 2,000 attendees would be needed to make it a success." People don't realize that, yeah, venue fees are steep, but when you reach the numbers that CEO Dreamland has, you NEED to have more staff involved with the event, which is going to make the cost of the event more expensive, THUS WHY VENUE FEES HAVE SKYROCKETED.



Back to tourney streamers. From what I've gathered, it's financially more sound for tourney streamers to do personal streams over competitive streams, or at least personal streams between competitive streams. This is because it gives them the ability to incentivize people to subscribe with the "SUB HYPE!" stuff on overlays. This causes a chain reaction because people will often be more willing to subscribe if it means their favorite caster or personality reacts to them giving them money. This is one thing that 2GGaming incorporates into their tourney streams (sometimes majors too), which I think adds to the atmosphere of a fun, laid back show. However, that's not a thing that is done in a broadcast the scale of the major eSports, because casters have work to do which isn't that. But competitive Smash streamers basically NEED to embrace their subscriber base right now, because when you have to pay to upgrade equipment, develop broadcast tech, commission artists/programmers, and try to reach the dream of not having to have a side 9-5 job to financially survive.



Anyways, the long and short of it is the difficult truth for Smash 4 is we need to find ways of pulling more reliable financial partnerships. Not saying that the ones that exist right now are bad, they're wonderful! But the goal should be to reach that level of financial support where maybe we could have the venue fee lowered, maybe get even stronger social media presence, heck, maybe even be able to afford ad spots to increase viewership further? Who knows!



LINK TO JEBAILEY'S CEO DREAMLAND POST MORTEM: https://www.facebook.com/Googlemyname/posts/10106506597298702?pnref=story

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