Bodybuilding vs. Powerlifting/Strongman vs. eSports -- a casual analysis

[Arch0wl]

This is multi-subject, so it could go in multiple subforums. I'm putting it here for that reason.

Individual sports make less money than team sports. This is a rule widely true across the board, but it's even more true when you're relatively sure who will win. The only exceptions to this rule are contact sports like MMA and boxing, but even then there are more variables and more for people to talk about.

A lot of people talk about eSports being either (a) not a sport or (b) something that is pathetic. The general public is widely aware of what bodybuilders are, and they perhaps consider it a sport, and it definitely requires physical activity, but what most people don't realize is that it's only slightly ahead of eSports in its valuation. In fact, most of the money that comes from bodybuilding is not from bodybuilding itself but in promoting ways for people to improve their physiques, which is indirectly a way to help people be hot and get laid. Since being hot and getting laid will probably be one of the top 5 most profitable things for as long as humanity is humanity, bodybuilding as an activity is extremely popular, but bodybuilding as a sport is not at all. eSports arguably exceed bodybuilding already.

Therichest.com tells us who the richest bodybuilders are

5. Dorian Yates $>4 million
4. Phil Heath $5 million
3. Dexter Jackson $>7 million
2. Ronnie Coleman $10 million
1. Jay Cutler $30 million

(We are not including Arnold, for obvious reasons, since his net worth was obtained by avenues other than bodybuilding.)

There's a couple of things to note about this. First, Jay Cutler is worth as much as he is because he's a businessman who has a line of supplements and endorsements. The supplement industry is enormous and many people like to believe that if you just buy what [insert person] tells you then you'll look like that person. This is clearly bullshit; if bodybuilders advertised what actually contributed most to their success, they'd say something like "this is my new testosterone-nandrolone injectable blend, made for dosing at 2 grams/week while you're doing ridiculously high volume workouts 4-5 times/week and eating 5,000 calories per day." But average people don't know anything about what bodybuilders actually do, and actually believe top bodybuilders are drug-free, so they'll buy supplements anyway. People do not research, and actually hate the activity of doing it, because they are not smart; they tend to be the opposite of smart. Stupidity is lucrative.

Unless pro gamers find out a way to endorse some blend of amphetamine (although actually they could get close -- preworkout supplements are banned for containing amphetamine analogues all the time) they will probably not have an extensive line of products for gamers to buy. So, comparing net worth where a person can make a ton of money from endorsements, personal training contracts and supplement lines vs. net worth from someone who needs to stream and win tournaments is not an accurate comparison.

With that said, eSports gamers are still pretty competitive to bodybuilders who make their money off of bodybuilding. And this is keeping in mind a few important things:

(A) Competitive bodybuilding has been around for over 60 years. Steve Reeves became Mr. Universe in 1950.

eSports in its current form (with streaming as a revenue model outside of tournaments, etc.) has been around for maybe 5 years, and eSports in general has been around for maybe 10-15. Bodybuilding has technically been around since Sandow, but competitive bodybuilding really took hold after Arnold came to prominence. Either way, though, bodybuilding has an enormous institutional advantage from how long it's been around.

(B) eSports are nowhere near as developed as they will be in the future. The bodybuilders today who have as much money as the five I just listed have been birthed into a time period where bodybuilding already existed, where paths to success were somewhat known and where they could cite previous bodybuilders as role models. This is not the case with eSports. Every eSport gamer currently playing can remember a time when eSports did not exist.

So, for eSports to be competitive with bodybuilding at all in terms of the net worth of the pro players is remarkable.

We don't know how much eSport gamers are worth, but we can get some idea:

This is the earnings that eSport gamers have made from tournaments alone

The winners of the International have earnings equivalent to winning Mr. Olympia four times. This undoubtedly exceeds the earnings of many IFBB pros as it is. The players who have $500,000 or more have earnings equivalent to winning Mr. Olympia twice.

We know that these players are not making all of their money from tournaments. All of the best pro players stream. This is a revealing article about how much players make from streams.

If any of these players clear $80k/year, and we have no reason to believe they don't with the numbers HotshotGG posted, then over five years you're looking at another half-million on top of what they already earned from tournaments, and their tournament total may be even greater than what they previously earned.

Essentially: over the next two years, you will see many pro gamers with net worths above $2 million.

Consider that the lowest-ranked bodybuilder on that list has a net worth of $4 million, and that's incredible. Gamers in a sport that has existed for a tenth of a time of bodybuilding are making half the money as the fifth richest bodybuilder.

Notice, by the way, that the title says "vs. Powerlifting/Strongman". I mentioned this because Strongmen are *already* not as rich as the richest progamers.

These are the winnings of the Arnold classic.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of these people had earnings comparable or less than the pro-gamers with $500,000 earnings. I'm not even listing powerlifters because there isn't any money people make from powerlifting. It's nonexistent. The greatest powerlifters do not make money from it.

So, what you have is something that is MOST CERTAINLY a sport being dwarfed by something that people consider "not a sport." Regardless of how you perceive it, eSports are not only here to stay but probably going to continue to grow.

However, you can draw a much more general conclusion from this information: no matter how popular the activity (and bodybuilding is extremely popular), if a competitive activity is individualistic and doesn't offer much in the way of variables or excitement or tribalism, which eSports do and bodybuilding does not, there probably won't be much money to make from the activity.

Since this is on FFR though, and FFR is a competitive game, let's take a second on the subject of why Stepmania/FFR will never be an eSport. The gist is that it carries all of the disadvantages of bodybuilding and powerlifting but with none of the advantages. I wrote this in the Garbage Bin, but it's worth reposting here:

the most successful skill-based things are almost always activities that involve a lot of variables that aren't clear-cut, so that a person who isn't an expert won't know what to expect. games that involve this will almost always be more popular than games that don't. so even if twitch *had* come out around [FFR's era of peak activity], games like DotA/LoL would still eclipse games like FFR.

e.g. the vast majority of the most popular sports are team sports. boxing and MMA are kind of the exceptions to this, but in general Roles + Variability = popularity, especially when you can treat the team like a tribe. roles with some degree of variability allow people to be better than others at that role, but it isn't obvious (except to good players) who is better than another person, so this has multiple popularity advantages due to both (A) the self-esteem of the players (who don't know for sure whether they suck, which in turn allows them to believe that they're good whether or not they actually are, which will in turn equate to more participation) and (B) for an audience watching (since it's not obvious to a non-expert who will win, and ignorant laypeople can still feel like their favorite team has a chance)

think of how many people will just yell at a TV when they're watching sports and act like they know better than the coaches. for maybe a few unlucky high school coaches who generally know their shit but for some reason never got lucrative contacts, they may be justified in their yelling. for the average dude? no chance in hell. but of course very average people believe *their* calls would have been the right ones, despite that people who know how to do this really well get paid millions to do it and the person yelling is probably making somewhere between 20-40k/yr in a suburb.

average idiots can think this way because the sport doesn't make it indisputable who is good and who isn't. rhythm games do. if for some reason I had to face off against EtienneSM on index, I would lose on almost every song, and most people in my circumstances wouldn't even bother playing, because their loss is so obviously inevitable. yet, a normal person would still play on a basketball team vs. someone who is NBA-tier good, even though their loss is about as probable, but it's not obviously so; you don't have numbers on a screen telling you how hard you're getting reamed in every respect, you just have a point total which is the sum of a handful of dudes.

this sort of... formula for watchability is something I've thought about a lot, since I've gone through countless rhythm game designs with people like shakesoda in attempt to make a rhythm game that sticks, multiplayer-wise. there really is none. either you make something where one person is obviously better than another (which competitive players want), or you add a lot of seemingly arbitrary non-skill based variables and turn it into a team thing (which competitive players hate).

there is no winning. especially since, once you go from something like music games to general team-based games, there are SO MANY avenues for making a very popular competitive game. it's like forcing yourself to try to write a popular song in 7/8 and then allowing yourself to use 4/4 instead. the medium is just so much more suited for that.

Rhythm games like FFR, by the way, are really similar to powerlifting in their competitive structure, AND they don't involve any amazing side-benefit like being really strong or really hot like powerlifting and bodybuilding respectively do. I don't think rhythm games will ever be very popular again for that reason.

Like Marc Lobliner said, bodybuilding is like midget tossing. It's a really weird thing that exists because so many people like it a lot. FFR is the same. eSports have every advantage working for them, so they'll continue to grow.

Meanwhile, mediocre NFL and NBA athletes who no one will remember can still become instant-millionaires, and there are thousands of them. Also, Michael Jordan makes $100 million in a year. That should put things in perspective.

[VisD]

Fascinating writeup. There's one more factor that's not mentioned yet, and it's led to the meteoric rise of a rising title in eSports---Counter Strike: Global Offensive. This is a game that was shit at the start, is being repeatedly shit on by its developers, and yet has seen an incredible increase in viewership over the past couple of years.

A large part of that is due to the fact that there's a huge betting scene going on, utilizing in-game items (weapon designs called "skins") that are 'worth' real money. It's insane how this borderline-illegal gambling ring has buoyed the game so much; any game that's up for betting --- even those between no-name russian teams --- get like 10,000 viewers, when more legit games between better teams which aren't on betting sites struggle to hit a couple of thousand. It's horse-racing for little children, and I wouldn't be surprised if other games in the future try to make use of a similar dynamic.