It's Clear Now: E-Sports Are COMPLETELY Out Of Control

Well, well, well...

I guess we knew this day was coming.

Last Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the Electronic Sports League, one of the big "e-sports" professional video-gaming leagues, is going to work with USADA and WADA to create a drug-testing program for video game players.

Let this process.

The final straw of this came when Kory Friesen said his team had used the ADHD drug Adderall (which is also usually used as a crisis drug in emergency mental hospitals) to attempt to focus in a game of Counter-Strike in a tournament recently.

You want to know why this is happening?

According to the Times article, total prize money for e-sports has now reached $71,000,000...

And about a quarter of that is in ONE TOURNAMENT!!

Look, I've been a gamer all my life, so I watch a lot of this stuff, especially the championships of League of Legends.

But this DOTA 2 tournament is out of control, and explains exactly why teams are, not unlike "real" physical sports, looking for every advantage they can.

The DOTA 2 tournament, run by the game's creators at Valve, was the first tournament to offer a $1,000,000 championship prize, in 2011.

Last year, they became the first to offer a FIVE million dollar championship prize.

This year, The International (the world championship of DOTA 2) has, once again, crowd-funded their prize pool to a current (as of the writing of this article) and staggering...

Seventeen million, five hundred sixty eight thousand dollars.

The winning team, as of right now (the number can still increase further, and probably will now that the group stages have started in the tournament, for advertisement of DOTA 2) will receive a mind-boggling about $6,325,000.

To give you an idea of how stupefying this is:

• The prize money for each of the four golf majors is now $10,000,000, with the winner receiving approximately $1,800,000.
• The top THREE teams from this tournament going on now will beat that number for a major golf champion significantly.  (The other finalist will receive about $2,725,000 -- meaning the final match in this tournament will be worth over three and a half million dollars!!  The third-placed team will receive a little more than $2,100,000 -- and that third-place match will be worth over $600,000.)
• If you took base salaries into account (according to Spotrac), the first-place prize of this tournament would only be outranked by 67 of the over 1500 NFL players this season.
• Cleanly divide that number by a 5-man team, and a player on the championship team would rank in the top 500 NFL salaries.
• It'd take 120 NBA players to beat the team payout for the champion team, since the minimum salary appears to be over $500,000. 
• It'd take 184 MLB players to beat the team payout, and a little over 400 to beat the individual payout.
• Oh, and one more number:  Twitch, the video-game streaming service which has utterly exploded onto the scene with the e-sports professionals, was sold last year to Amazon for $970,000,000.

Yeah, you think some of these guys wouldn't use drugs to get their hands on some of THAT kind of money?  On top of griefing (one team was expelled from the Oceanic League of League of Legends for having three players tossed for various griefing and harassment issues), illegal ringers (a prominent American franchise was banned for a "split" -- one season part -- from the second-level Challenger division on the North American League of the same game for using a team analyst as a player), etc.

Too much money, too fast.  Rein it in before you lose it all.