Whole lot of confusion up ins.
1: "Pro gaming" is hard motherfucking shit. There's a godawful amount of training (though Stephano claims that he spends less time practicing than most any other pro), and the training generally isn't fun. Hope you like grinding out the same god damn experimental build 30 times in a day against a teammate to see if it can stand up to a few basic rushes.
2: People have asked about where the money comes from. Generally speaking, players join teams, companies pay teams to advertise for them. This is something that Stephano's team, EG, does really well. Even if a player like Incontrol isn't tournament-winning-caliber, he's a charismatic and funny guy, and he promotes the shit out of his sponsors.
3: More on money, and specifically streams: people watch them. A lot. It's 3:00 my time right now - hardly peak streaming hours - and I see that Idra has nearly 4000 viewers and White-Ra has 2200. Now, those are both marketable, big-name players, and most individual streams don't get nearly that much attention even at better hours, but that daily viewership - players make money off of commercials they run based on how many people are viewing their streams - makes for nice supplemental income.
Now, as for the major streams? It's hard to get exact numbers because of restreams and it's hard to account for China for the League of Legends streams and shit. But for a basic idea of what the biggest tournaments get, MLG Spring peaked at 437,000 concurrent viewers, with 4.7 million unique viewers over the course of the event. I think most Dreamhacks have about 90,000 concurrent viewers at their peaks. The IPL had 350,000 peak concurrent viewers around the same time as well.
4: Someone above mentioned Korea having two television channels dedicated to Starcraft. This is not quite accurate.
Brood War was fucking huge in Korea, but it had been going through a long, slow decline for a while. Competition from new games like League of Legends, the Savior scandal (one of the absolute best players that had ever played the game was caught convincing rising talent to throw games for illegal betting purposes)... shit added up. Two gaming-centric television channels broadcasted Korean Brood War games: OGN and MBC Game. OGN is still around, but MBC Game had to rebrand itself as a music channel.
So why didn't they pick up Starcraft 2 if it's so popular?
Because nobody cares about Starcraft 2 in Korea.
Korea has the best players, but the general public doesn't give a shit about it. And this is problematic, because that means that sponsors can't afford to give a shit about it (with a couple exceptions, of course), so you have all these teams full of incredible talent but absolutely no money. And Europe and North America are full of fans and sponsors and huge-prize-pool tournaments, but so rarely do we produce anyone actually capable of competing with the Koreans.
5: But why the fuck would people watch other people play fucking videogame tournaments?
Because lots of us like seeing superhuman feats. We like seeing people do shit that we know that we could never accomplish.
But it's important that we have a frame of reference. I don't watch figure skating because I can't tell the difference between the degree of difficulty in one move with the degree of difficulty in another. That's why for some people, the superhuman feat is this:
Or this:
And for others it's this:
Or this:
