The Queue: Somebody’s got a case of the Queuesdays

I think I need more coffee.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll stop wallowing in ennui long enough to answer.

It varies, based on their general skillset and what they did while they were competing. In some ways, it’s pretty similar to meatsports athletes.

The obvious move is to grow their brand while they compete and then just stream for a living. It’s not at all stable income, but it can work. They already have a fanbase from when they played, and they probably already know how to play a video game, so why not, right?

Some of them, if they’re still somewhat popular in their title or organization, will get a job there. Bjergsen is a coach with TSM after retiring from last year, for instance. Bakery is the director of esports within the Dignitas organization. There are also people like Custa who were very popular with fans and have some level of public speaking skills, who go on to be desk analysts or even casters.

Some people also just re-enter regular life, get office jobs or whatever. There are plenty of people who have gold medals who’ve taken this route, too.

That’s bait.

There are very, very few times I will, and they’re usually titles which are so massive and so culturally ubiquitous, and I know I’m not going to have the time to get around to consuming the media before it gets spoiled. The last Star Wars movie, for instance. While I generally like Star Wars, I’m not a fan enough to make it a priority, and since it came out a week or two before Christmas, I knew there was no way I was making it to the theater before I stumbled across the ending in some dumb meme on Twitter or Reddit.

It’s usually the big stuff like that for me — Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Marvel. If it’s something smaller, even if I know I’m not going to interact with it for a while, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spoil it.

Though, the one thing Marvel put out that I was really interested in was Wandavision, because I have far more space in my life to stream a series as opposed to go to a theater, and that was spoiled almost immediately — but I get it, that song was a banger.

While I do think it’s pretty likely we’ll see some degree of corporate restructuring, that particular “leak” is nonsense. You’d have to have a level of access within that company to be able to know all this about not only the whole corporate structure, but also the trajectory of each individual game to know all this. Basically, the C-suite. And it is vanishingly unlikely that they’re about to blow away your entire career by leaking it on the MMO-Champion forums.

For me, the real giveaway is that they took pains to mention nearly all of Blizzard’s big IP, and then said they’re putting out a gatcha game featuring characters from all of them. Heroes of the Storm is still in some degree of active development, and it’s pretty much that.