The Glamorous Life of a Pro Gamer
Teams are dolling out signing bonuses, big salaries and housing to attract the best teens and twenty-somethings in the $1.5 billion esports industry.
In 2011, Dorothy Schmale dropped off her 14-year-old son at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City. Until then, Michael’s obsession with video games had seemed like any other hobby. Sure, Schmale worried about the time gaming took away from his homework, but it kept him out of trouble. Now, here she was, sending him off on a 13-plus-hour bus ride to Columbus, Ohio, where he would compete in his first major tournament for Call of Duty. “It was hard for me to let him go,” she says. “But that’s really when I knew this was going to take off.”
Six years later, Michael Schmale (also known as SpaceLy) signed a contract to represent a newly formed organization called Ghost Gaming, which announced it was paying him and each of his teammates a $4,000 monthly salary, as well as a shared $50,000 signing bonus. More impressive still were the perks: Ghost housed them in a 10-bedroom mansion that overlooks Hollywood and, incidentally, was formerly occupied by Justin Bieber.