In August, the best Dota 2 teams in the world competed for $18,429,613 at The International, a prize pool greater than every previous International tournament combined. It was the biggest prize pool in esports history. Back in January of 2015, third-place MOBA Smite offered the sixth largest: $2,612,259 at its World Championship. The trend is obviously towards larger events and larger piles of cash, rained down on the crème de la crème of professional esports players. It makes for great headlines and a hell of a dramatic tournament. But are those massive piles of money actually good for the players or the esports scene at large?
Smite developers Hi-Rez Studios didn’t think so, which is why they decided to limit the 2016 World Championship to a $1 million prize pool, spreading the rest of the money out across a season of smaller events.
“To be honest with you, it was a change we were very nervous about,” Hi-Rez President Stew Chisam told me in a recent interview at the Smite Super Regionals, the last major event before 2016’s World Championship in January. “To come out and say, ‘hey, my World Championship prizing is going down’ is something to be nervous about, even though our overall prizing was staying the same or going up some from year-to-year. So I think what has pleased me the most about that change was how very well received it was. I got thank you notes from players. Even, I think, the general audience really understood the reasons we did that and saw very clearly that this was best for the long term health of the sport.”
“To be honest with you, it was a change we were very nervous about,” Hi-Rez President Stew Chisam told me in a recent interview at the Smite Super Regionals, the last major event before 2016’s World Championship in January. “To come out and say, ‘hey, my World Championship prizing is going down’ is something to be nervous about, even though our overall prizing was staying the same or going up some from year-to-year. So I think what has pleased me the most about that change was how very well received it was. I got thank you notes from players. Even, I think, the general audience really understood the reasons we did that and saw very clearly that this was best for the long term health of the sport.”
Hi-Rez considers the change a success for Smite, but what about the players? They’ve spent all of 2015’s Season 2 playing for what’s supposedly a wider and shallower prize pool. Do they like the change, too?
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