This article is a follow up piece of sorts to an article I wrote back in August 2018 about the structure of current speedrunning tournaments and their various inadequacies when it comes to supporting the type of competition speedrunning does. If you haven’t read that article, I recommend you do so before reading this one as this piece assumes that you have done so.

Allow me to begin by clarifying a certain stance I have as the author, I do not believe more money entering the speedrun scene via these means is inherently a bad thing. I also don’t think it’s inherently a good thing either. My goal with this is to present this as informatively as possible, but inevitably I am a man with opinions, so do bear that in mind. It’s also worth noting that a vast majority of my experience with other eSport entities comes in the form of fighting games, I have very limited knowledge of other scenes like FPS or RTS games, I feel fighting games are an adequate starting point of comparison due to the very similar grassroots nature of the scene versus something like Overwatch being incubated from the start to be an eSport but nevertheless, that’s where my experience lies.

Let’s begin with some context, speedrun tournaments are growing ever increasingly popular with a variety of games and communities, but the real inciting event here is the Global Speedrun Association (hereby shortened to GSA for brevity) announcing that they would be partnering with the development team behind Celeste for a speedrun league with a five thousand dollar sponsored prize pool. This is big news and significant in a lot of ways and many people, myself included, have already sounded off with various opinions and perspectives on the matter. Cash prizes for speedrunning events are not necessarily new, A Link To The Past Randomizer has ran a couple with prizes and Twitch Rivals ran a Mega Man 11 race with a staggering $25,000 prize pool. But Randomizer had limited scope and Rivals was more of a sponsored event than a tournament, which is why they managed to occur relatively uneventfully. The introduction of large cash prizes into speedrun tournaments/leagues is a much bigger deal.

Promotional image for the Celeste GSA League. Five thousand dollary-doos!

Money Changes Things

Simply put, introducing the possibility of being paid for time put into a given activity drastically alters the landscape of that activity. This is nearly universally true for anything, video games, specific genres of games, physical sports, hobby-craft on Etsy, you get the picture. I’ve seen a fair amount of rhetoric going around that speedrunning events having cash prizes wouldn’t change anything and I can only characterise that standpoint as painfully naive. This is to say nothing of whether such a change would be good or bad, but money always changes things. Time and time again this is true and if you’ve been a speedrunner for a few years or so, you should already know this because we’ve been here before and are still experiencing the boom caused by it.

For those not familiar, internet speedrunning initially started out with people physically mailing VHS tapes around. Only with the rising popularity of streaming did speedrunning properly catch on, and only fairly recently did anyone actually start to make any money off it. Streaming has only gotten easier as time has gone on and recent developments like the Twitch Affiliate program have made it even easier for speedrun streamers to find a niche and get paid for their effort. There’s more money in the scene now than ever and it has in turn made it explosively, exponentially more popular. I’m a statistic in that pile somewhere and while making a living in this environment is still prohibitively difficult for the vast majority of people, there’s no denying what a staggering effect it has had.

User count on speedrun.com against date. Explosive growth would be something of an understatement.

This is just the obvious example of how money changes a scene, in our case it’s manifested in a few forms. It’s made the scene incredibly popular, bordering on mainstream gaming culture. It’s also slanted the landscape even further towards particular kinds of games and streamers due to the demographical breakdown of the average Twitch viewing audience. For the most part though, I think a majority of us would be hard pressed to describe this situation as worse than bygone days, but bear this in mind when you hear one of the old guard grumbling about “the SDA days” or some such. They’re not mad, money has demonstrably changed things. It always does, but it says nothing about whether or not that change is good or bad. Now that we’re on board with this, let’s address the next base level concern.

This is Going To Happen Eventually

Much like how money always changes a scene, money is also a powerful motivator. Numerous tournament organisers want cash flow in their endeavours and have made efforts to achieve this, however small the scale. Some runners want this because people like getting paid. Wacky, I know. The viewing audience is also absolutely there for this to happen, it’s been building up to it for a while with channels like SpeedGaming and GSA.

What this means is that this change, where prize pool tournaments and leagues are standardised aspects of speedrun culture, is going to happen regardless of what you or I feel about it. This is not to say that it’s pointless to say anything about it, but that this change is almost certainly going to happen to us in some form in the near future and as a result I find it prudent to spend less time ruminating on whether speedrunning should go this route and more on being prepared for what that change might look like. Maybe some of you find the very notion of cash prize tournaments objectionable, which is fine and as valid a reaction as any, but historical examples of this in comparable game communities like fighting games or MOBAs don’t bear the position out in the long term.

EVO 2016 Street Fighter V. Check out that stadium!

However, there are some intricacies of this, particularly with regards to the culture that makes speedrunning as an esport a uniquely complex endeavour compared to other more traditional competitive games. My previous article examined the structural problems faced by our current events and what would need to be resolved before speedrunning could flourish into a respectable, cohesive eSport. That hasn’t gone away or become any less relevant since much of those issues still haven’t been satisfactorily addressed but for the time being, I’m going to examine a potential value shift in a hypothetical reality where paid prize pools are normal and speedrunning is already eSports.

Let’s start with a dichotomy. Currently, in order to make any appreciable income off speedrunning, you need to be streaming it and you need to have a reasonably well-performing stream. On a basic level, this entails being entertaining, charming and likeable enough to maintain and hold an audience while you perform your speedruns. This is no doubt difficult to do but notice how the thing one actually makes money off there is the stream, not the quality of the speedruns. One begets the other since people who are financially supported by streaming will generally be doing runs significantly more often than those who aren’t, and so have an advantage in sheer playtime if absolutely nothing else. It’s not necessarily guaranteed, but it’s certainly more likely.

Paid prize pools change that instantly. Now getting a payout would ride on one’s immediate prowess in a given speedrun rather than one’s ability to juggle an audience while doing so. This is unquestionably a good thing for certain kinds of people who are unable to engage with streaming as a form of income in a reliable fashion, they can simply place well in events instead. This dichotomy already exists in fighting games: there are popular fighting game streamers with non-existent tournament results and plenty of noteworthy tournament performers who have no streaming presence to speak of. A strong tournament performance can also bolster the notoriety of a player and feed back into their stream, potentially giving them a chance to break into streaming. It adds more avenues for participants to accrue a following and financial support for their effort, in theory, at any rate.

This graph is basically impossible to read at this size, but see this comparison of the hours per month streamed by fighting game legend and Best eSports Player Of 2018 SonicFox versus full time Celeste speedrunner TGH_sr. SonicFox streams about 40 hours a month, TGH is averaging around 180 — Stats sourced from sullygnome.com

It’s hard to say for certain how this will actually pan out in practice, but the reality may not be so rosy as all of that. It could be that it will turn out as normally and generally positively as it does above but speedrunning is distinct from other types of competitive gaming in that it is paradoxically a largely solo activity. This was mentioned in my previous article, but it bears repeating in a different context: speedruns are non-interactive, your strategy in a speedrun doesn’t really change even with another human racer in the picture. In order to become a tournament winning player in another directly competitive game, you’ll have to face off against other tournament quality players, possibly travelling around to various events to accomplish this, maybe even internationally. You can grind ranked ladder and you can even get very dang good doing it, but in order to win tournaments you will eventually need tournament experience. Speedrunning, for the most part, doesn’t work like that. The grind is all there really is in speedrunning, there’s no events to travel to, no tournament technique that is distinct, no human opponents or metagames to practice against, all you need is yourself and the game.

This is one of the reasons the barrier to entry to this hobby is so profoundly low, but it could end up biasing tournaments with a payout even more harshly to those who are already in a position to stream those long hours grinding and practising a single game’s speedrun, creating a kind of snowball effect of “rich get richer” that is so endemic to the way stream growth in general works. Other competitive games obviously also require people who are in a position to dump huge amounts of time on it, but the emphasis on events and generally requiring experience against human opponents often needing travel does not lend itself well to streaming all the while. This effect is still present in other sorts of competitive games, but speedrunning’s solitary nature could exacerbate this somewhat. This maybe sounds a touch dramatic to some of you, but bear in mind these are hypotheticals, I’m not declaring this is absolutely how it would play out, it’s a possibility to consider.

This is still getting ahead of myself somewhat, in order to even run a tournament for a game, you need entrants and what better way to find entrants than to choose what’s already popular? This smacks headlong into a potential culture shift that’s already partially underway in the form of game homogeneity.

This is pretty basic so I feel more confident in speaking on more concrete terms about this one, but obviously only games with a large enough player base to support tournaments are gonna get tournaments with decent cash prizes. These are also likely to be the games that already enjoy a seat of prominence and respect in the subculture due to relative popularity with specific demographics of people that comprise the majority of the Twitch audience, bolstered by events like GDQ that attempt to appeal to said demographics. I’m beating around the bush somewhat but I hope you like Mario games or the eSports angle probably isn’t going to hold much value for you. This one I do not think is particularly theoretical given the hobby is currently in the state of snowballing particular games and communities just because That’s What Viewers Like and it’s been going that route ever since viewers became a concern at all to people within the scene. Tournaments would just be another extension of that snowball “rich get richer” effect but more localised to specific games.

A cluttered screenshot of a random week of the GSA schedule. This is also not tremendously readable so I’ll spare you the squinting, it’s entirely Mario and Super Metroid.

Now, you can spin that any number of ways, a negative way to spin it is that it further erodes a sense of diversity in the scene and may create further difficulty to games that cannot organise prize pots to attract hopeful new blood to the game. Frankly I’d declare that to already be a reality, just in terms of audience share rather than explicit cash.

But in a positive sense, the fact that these things would likely slip less popular games by means eSports is pretty unlikely to ever wholly replace the current way of speedrunning. I’m not suggesting literally everyone is going to pivot to something popular because there’s money there. There will always be people who can make anything they like work if they’re charming enough to have a stream that supports them regardless, and there will also be people who do not care about that angle at all and just do it for its own sake. Speedrunning’s solitary nature is both a weakness and a strength in this regard in that it probably actually can have it both ways if it wanted to, but it may come at the expense of a steeper uphill climb to attract people to an unproven game that didn’t get traction in the scene out of the gate. Breakout grassroots successes spearheaded by dedicated runners like Battle for Bikini Bottom could become rarer if the scene’s emphasis shifts, for instance.

Average monthly viewers graph for Battle For Bikini Bottom sourced from sullygnome.com. Note how it’s completely zero until it suddenly spikes in August due to a surge of interest in the game as a speedrun.

This is all very well and good, but where’s the money coming from? It has to come from somewhere after all. For the most part, community tournaments if they have prizes at all are usually put up by the community itself and are rather small since speedrunners are not the sort to regularly be flashing the green. The Celeste GSA tournament is significant in that its prize pool comes from the developers themselves, which is an interesting development with a whole host of implications going forward. A brief preface though before I go into detail, I regard the Celeste developers as well-intentioned people with a strong interest in the scene, also their game is really good.

Nevertheless, the road to hell is paved with good intention. In fighting games, prize pools are a combination of sponsored cash from publishers, developers and third party sponsors and money collected from people’s entry fees. This is as good a method as any for those games because developer and player interest are generally in alignment in a healthy community relationship. Developers want players enjoying their games, players want an enjoyable, fair competition to be had within those games, developers can therefore use tournament feedback to tweak and adjust the balance of their games accordingly, so everyone is happy. In theory at least, in practice this goes tits up all the time, but the theory is sound.

Speedrunning is different, speedrunners for their part do not generally like patches, speedrunning develops best in a stable environment which is what leads some communities to adopt running on older patches. At present (with devs of all kinds but especially indies taking an increased interest in speedrunning), patching philosophy and the inherent strain on community relations poses its own challenges that modern day speedrunning is still figuring out and that topic could be a whole article by itself but for the time being, no money is in play so the outcome tends to ride on how the developer behaves. This is still a gamble. I’ve had experiences both good and bad with various teams of developers, some of them are there just to observe, some of them are fans, some of them treat speedrunners like an extension of QA which usually goes south quickly since speedrunners don’t like being mistaken for unpaid labour. Sponsored cash from a developer instantly risks a more dramatically controlling behaviour from developers who take an interest.

A common sight on many speedrun leaderboards for games released recently.

Intentions good or no, developers actively having skin in the “health” of a speedgame via financially backing tournaments has the potential for pretty severe conflicts of interest, since they are now literally invested in how appealing their game is to compete in. This is rife with opportunities to go wrong and is also going to be gambling tremendously on the good sense of the developers, which is a gamble I would give extremely serious thought to before committing. Think carefully, how many games do you run where you would trust the developers not to tweak things if they had money riding on it? How many runners do you think would conveniently acquiesce on the matter when money gets involved? Lots of speedgames have a dumb trick or two that are unpopular due to difficulty or awkwardness or whatever, but no two people are going to agree on what makes a particular trick “healthy” for a speedgame or not. “Health” is conceptually nonsense when applied to speedrunning, it’s never going to mean the same thing to enough people and it’s especially not going to mean the same thing to the people who actually made the game in the first place.

Speedrunning is explicitly about not playing by the written rules of a given game. We abuse glitches to their maximum potential, deliberately concoct absurd edge cases to induce game-breaking effects and deconstruct games to their base components to find more things to exploit. We have nearly no sense of fair play and because no two people can agree on what constitutes “intended” or the distinction between a “glitch” and an “exploit”, speedrunning instead adopts open season on everything at least partially for the purpose of minimising semantic bickering. If you’ve ever seen speedrunners argue about categories, can you imagine how apocalyptically shitty it would be if those arguments were being had with thousands of dollars on the line about what tricks should and shouldn’t remain?

This all sounds very dramatic, but if you don’t hang around indie game speedrunning very much you may not know that a lot of that isn’t especially theoretical either. Developers have literally patched games with the intent of maintaining “health” of a speedgame for players and viewers already, in line with the results of arguments. One of those games is the focal point of the entire discussion to start with, since Celeste actively culled Menu Storage Glitch from itself for this exact reason. It’s hard to imagine this being an isolated incident if more developers go the route of sponsoring speedrun tournaments. Consider very carefully for yourself if this is the route you wish for us to go down, too much I see an eagerness to adopt speedrunning into the eSports fold without considering the implications of that with enough rigour.

This in turn directly calls into question the very viability of speedrunning as an eSport in this capacity, since a united and willing player base is necessary for it to take off. If one bad argument over a new glitch is all it takes to fracture a community and thus, a speedgame, it could be seen as too volatile to be worth investing in. This is a valid and worthwhile topic, but a little tangential so let me steer back on track to dev involvement.

Consider this hypothetical, outlandish and unlikely that it may be. Nintendo takes an interest in speedrunning and begins funding events. That itself is pretty unlikely, but consider how they’re likely to feel about the modifications and hacks of their games that have proven so popular with speedrunners. Things like Link To The Past Randomizer are likely to be perceived as direct competition to whatever it is they’d prefer to sponsor, on top of also being a ROMhack and therefore occupying the weird legal grey area. Pressure from such entities could drive off support from popular but unofficial efforts. Those of you who think this is ludicrous on face value would do well to familiarise yourselves with the story of a modification to Super Smash Bros Brawl known as “Project M”.

To give an extremely simplified version, Project M was a mod of Brawl created to make the game faster and more appealing to the competitive audience that emerged around Smash Melee, largely in response to the fact that Brawl as a competitive game is bluntly, a bit crap. It enjoyed some popularity in the Smash scene and was actively developed for a time, until Nintendo started taking an interest in actively supporting tournaments themselves. They publicly disapproved of the mod and while they never directly issued any legal threats over it, the looming threat and influence was enough that some tournaments pulled the game from their lineup and streams for the mod were removed, and the pressure eventually led to the team deciding to cease development on Project M altogether.

This image is unnecessary but is however extremely funny — wikipedia.com/Project_M_(video_game)

Project M is not entirely dead, people do still play the mod and run tournaments, but this pressure severely stunted its scene unnaturally. By a similar token, scenes like Randomizer would run a similar risk of gambling with the goodwill of the license holder should they ever seek to get involved. This scenario is unlikely, I mentioned as much at the start of this example, but Nintendo only started sponsoring tournaments recently compared to other fighting game tournament backers. This was a big turnaround from them being anywhere from ignorant to actively hostile towards competitive play. The story of Project M illustrates that such things are absolutely within the realm of possibility, much more than mere conjecture. This is of particular interest to speedrunning given that Link To The Past Randomizer is among its more developed tournament scenes and one of the pioneering scenes in that regard.

Average monthly viewers for Brawl. Development of Project M was halted in December 2015, right around the same time the game it was modding entered viewership freefall and has never really recovered.

From corporate ethics to community ethics, let’s turn our attention to the elephant in the room that nobody likes talking about, cheating. We’ll start with a behaviour that is not necessarily cheating but more just considered extremely bad manners at the moment, strat hiding. The act of concealing knowledge from other players, maliciously or otherwise. This behaviour will probably net you some strong words from other people in your community since it conflicts with speedrunning’s ethos of shared collaboration; we expect strategies to be shared and most runners are more than willing to help newer players with the nuances of their game. Runners are just big dorks who really like these games after all and there’s nothing big dorks enjoy more than talking shop to someone showing an interest in their area of speciality, it’s only natural.

This is unlikely to completely go away of course, but tournaments with big cash prizes pretty strongly disincentivizes strong players from being so eager to spill their secrets as they currently are. In a tough tournament, concealing a new discovery until the right moment could very well be the thing that clinches the win for you and knowledge is one of the only ways to gain a concrete advantage over another in this hobby due to the lack of direct interaction between players. This behaviour is one I virtually guarantee becomes more common in direct proportion to prize tournament frequency. If you thought you could make your chances at winning a substantial cash prize better by keeping your secrets until the critical moment, wouldn’t you do it? I’d do it, and all it takes is one for everyone to start doing it. Again, there’s precedent for this in other competitive scenes. The controversial “olofboost” from Counter Strike: Global Offensive, a technique kept concealed from the meta for months until it was deployed at a critical juncture to completely reverse the momentum and secure the win for team Fnatic. Fighting game players developing counter pick or pocket characters to other professional players characters in secret, Armada’s Young Link to counter Jigglypuff in Melee being the example most are perhaps familiar with. Armada specifically requested his training sets of Young Link in Europe not be filmed to continue developing his technique in secret to blindside the competition when it mattered and it paid off dividends for the enterprising Swede.

Pound V (2011) Armada vs Hungrybox, the crowd began to loudly cheer “AR-MA-DA” during this set for his unconventional character choice.

This was not popularly considered scummy or dishonest by Armada. In fact, it’s widely considered to have been a pretty exciting development and a surprising twist for the game. That’s fighting game community values and it works for them since players are always trying crazy new stuff and players must face off directly, a new strategy can be adapted to by the opponent even if it does put them on the back foot. If a runner busted out a new strategy that saved significant time in a crucial match, the opponent can’t really do anything about it, it’s unlikely they’ll even know until the match is over.

Now, how one feels about that is entirely a matter of perspective. One could argue that a new strategy being pulled out could be very exciting to watch, I doubt it’d feel that good to lose to though. I also have my suspicions that it’d wash badly with some viewers in almost equal measure to people who thought it was exciting due to that culture of shared collaboration. If someone in speedrunning pulled a move roughly equivalent to the CS:GO “olofboost”, we’d crucify them. And yet, if there was a lot of money on the line, it seems pretty likely people would do it anyway. And unlike in other competitive games where they have rules on exploits that toe the line of fair play, speedrunning can’t function under that sort of restriction. “No glitches or strats that people don’t already know about” is a preposterous rule on face value and would spark all sorts of semantic arguments from this community that is notoriously good at those, you can’t stop reasonably stop someone from keeping their secrets until it benefits them to show their hand and once that begins, everyone is incentivized to keep their secrets. This would be a dramatic shift from how the community currently operates and likely seems very drastic but still, many a grassroots scene turned eSport has been here before, anyone who thinks speedrunners wouldn’t be susceptible to the same things because we’re just inherently more moral and friendly is a painfully naive individual indeed.

This is to say nothing of the even less scrupulous individuals out there who may just attempt to cheat outright. Cheating in speedrunning is always a concern, since our current arrangement largely functions on the honour system. Sure, we have run verification but in order to prompt an investigation you have to actually arouse suspicion first. Numerous runs with splices or other cheats have gone undetected for years because nobody looked into it all that closely. This isn’t the fault of anyone in particular so much as just the nature of the fact speedrunning has no vetting procedure besides how much scrutiny community volunteers happen to be applying at the time. At the moment this is kept in check mostly by the fact that there isn’t actually a whole lot of inherent value in having a World Record, despite what most would probably have you believe. In order to become a noteworthy player you need to perform well and stream regularly and streaming hours of attempts to improve is a natural cycle that builds trust in a player and grows their respective stream. Cheating doesn’t really figure into this. It’s a shortcut to the result with none of the benefit, you don’t really get much out of it. People still do it sometimes, but figuring out a method that actually allows you to get anything out of your cheating is more difficult than just actually getting good at the game and streaming consistently, on average.

This article has way too many graphs in it, so here’s a random picture of a speedrun stream I happened to be watching. 1778 attempts on a 3 hour game is a hell of a lot of time spent streaming the game!

Tournaments with a cash prize change that by providing a very immediate reward for players who want to try and pull a fast one. And it’s much easier to cheat at speedrunning than other competitive games again due to the decentralised and not directly competitive nature of it. Once again, we have established examples of this, Link To The Past Randomizer was among the first speedrun communities to start offering cash prizes for their tournaments due to them being pioneers in this direction and they’re also among the tournament scenes with the most well-known instances of cheating. I do not suspect this is a coincidence. Some of these stories are just incredible though, shoutouts to the guy who got his wife to play the same random seed alongside him and tell him where the items were in different locations, that is absolutely three hundred IQ. Jokes aside there have been less funny things like people who wrote programs to scrub the ROM for item locations ahead of time, necessitating a counter fix from the people who develop Randomizer. You offer cash prizes for this stuff, there are some out there who will start finding as many ways as they can to gain the edge. Be ready for it.

And this loops back into a different problem with speedrun culture is a lack of centralisation and the online nature of it. If someone acts like a jackass in one game and gets kicked out of one community, there’s very little preventing them from floating on back in another, or adopting a different alias. This is another thing that calls into question the viability of it as an eSport in its current state, it doesn’t take too many instances of this occurring before the lack of integrity incurs a collective feeling of no confidence and the entire thing folds. There’s also only really so much you can do to combat this short of having players play live, and that just isn’t practical for the way our community is laid out.

A match from a Link To The Past Randomizer Tournament in 2017. Spiffy overlay.

Dot Done

There’s likely still much more to go over and more finer details that can be discussed but this piece is already getting a bit ridiculous and I hope my tone doesn’t come across as doom saying because my intent is not necessarily to convey that this would definitely be terrible, but rather to challenge the notion that more money into the scene by any means is guaranteed to be a good thing. Even though claiming that Thing Bad tends to be the most effective way to provoke a reaction, my aim here is less Thing Bad and more Thing Has Various Dynamics That Need To Be Considered Carefully, but that doesn’t exactly make for a very punchy title, does it?

My long term concern for this is that if more players are not willing and able to have a strong conviction regarding the direction we should take this in, then unaffiliated third parties will simply swoop in and exert their influence and create speedrunning eSports in their image before any of us are ready or satisfied about it. But if we are able to take responsibility and consider what we truly would like out of it, we can make something reasonable out of all of this, that is the reality I’d like to believe in. We’ll see how the future bears this out.

Ah well, if you made it this far, thanks for reading and however/if this develops more in this direction in the coming years, I hope this piece has given you more to think about and enabled you to make the right choices about how you’d like to see it take form. May we live in interesting times…

Punchy can often be found complaining on Twitter and streams his own speedruns, usually also while complaining.

Thanks to Will “Ultigonio” B. for helping me edit this, he makes games and music and also large portions of my Twitter whether he likes it or not.