did you even read the post
Show Content
SideshowMoney:
As I said above, you really need about £17,000 of sponsorship per event, which is $22,000 and includes the travel costs for teams. It breaks down roughly to £5k prize, £4k production, and then £8k travel. There is a risk that teams won’t be able to afford the bit out of pocket if it’s twice per year which would add another few thousand, but if they were able to find organisations (which again no teams are hardcore searching for) then that cost could be mitigated.
So we’re looking at raising £34,000 per year for those two events. Is that worth it? I think so. We tried running standalone online events but people don’t engage in them since leagues and scrims are the norm, and pumping money like this into online cups/leagues would not generate anywhere near the same level of engagement. It’s not the money games that gets people hyped like in other games, it’s the personalities and players being there in person and competing between regions.
At the moment the teams rely on fundraising for travel support, with the rest covered by the range of sponsors you saw on display at i58. Relying on fundraising isn’t great long-term, and I think we’ll see it in a huge decline if we had two events per year. It’s speculation but none of the fundraisers met their goal this year; they raised about $10k, normally the amount is more like $15k, though this year they were announced fairly late and without much hype.
As the beginnings of a solution, I’d like to push the teams toward organisations that can afford to help with at least accommodation to reduce costs marginally as well as aiming to get more sponsorship than is required for the prize/production and using that for travel of top teams. This should reduce but not replace fundraising, which I think is still a powerful tool in TF2. I’d prefer to see the fundraising be event-specific rather than for each team, with an event compendium. More on that idea below as it’s a little tangential.
My idea for a compendium is to replace the “perks” for fundraising with a digital item that you buy once for the event and that money is assigned where needed. It gives people more of a motivation to buy it other than being truly generous and the name is easily identifiable due to its use in dota. Charge £10 or so for the item which contains: team profiles, artwork, interviews, etc. It would also make you eligible for giveaways during the tournament, allow you to play fantasytf2 for the event, vote for players for an MVP award, vote for the teams in an all-star match, vote in a fragmovie competition before the event like i46, and let you take part in a predictions competition for points/prizes. We could make the perks fairly easily and as it is event-specific rather than team specific you have access to many more people with skills. I think it’d work very well and it’s probably less work than actually fulfilling hundreds of weapon signing requests.