Where to begin. It seems the hate for PPV by a portion of the community has robbed them of their rationality. No sport charges 20 bucks for PPV? Nobody pays 20 bucks for entertainment? Are you 12 or just living on a different planet because this is demonstrably false.

Only hardcore fans will pay to see it. Ok, sounds good. After all, a casual fan isn't too concerned about seeing every single tournament, I'm sure they won't mind missing the grand total of 2 pay walled events this spring.

Take a look at reddit you declare. Ok, we could take a look at the frontage post about Violets victory, or perhaps one of the many arena related posts made during the actual event.

I particularly liked the illogical point made about setting back professional gaming, which was accompanied by the suggestion that only 5 bucks should be charged. So at what arbitrary price point is ESPORTS killed exactly? So you don't object to the pay wall at all, which may have been a valid point if supported by some actual reasoning? So this all boils down to, "it's too expensive for me". Welp, that's not much of a discussion point, your personal financial situation isn't all that interesting.

So your Op is pretty rubbish and its depressing to see it get upvoted. Let's try something else. I would like to see some proof or at least a good reason why the PPV model is bad. I would like to cite something I found odd over the past couple of days, the fact that some people seem to think the number of people watching restrooms if proof the model fails. Far from it. Media gets pirated, it is known. However, in this case piracy of the stream has 2 benefits.

1) Sponsor ROI. Increased eyes on the sponsors is good for business. It wouldn't event surprise me if MLG kept an eye on the restream stats and uses them next time they talk to their sponsors. While this event had no commercials, it did have product placement and sponsorship messages for all of MLGs major sponsors including specific features for DR Pepper, bic razors and NOS.

2) Proven interest and demand. Rubbish media doesn't get pirated, MLG is desirable enough to watch vs doing something else, but not enough for some people to pay for it. This is actionable information. You cannot eliminate piracy for premium media but you can improve service and adjust pricing to convert more people into customers.

PPV is good for ESPORTS because it is sustainable as an actual business model. Live ESPORTSonly events are for the most part losing money. They are investing in something they believe will turn a profit later. There are sustainable tournaments such as Dreamhack that aren't bleeding revenue because the ESPORTS component is a parasite that feeds from the main event, where the real money actually is. The longtime question is, how do you make a profit in ESPORTS? If you can't, then the business fails. It is not a charity and this would not be the first time it's imploded due to bad decisions. With PPV, every single paying customer is of great value. In simplistic terms, you have someone paying 20 bucks vs someone seeing say, 50 commercials over the course of a free event at a 2 dollar CPM. This makes that person worth 50x2/1000 (cpm is per 1000 impressions, 2 dollar CPM is a fairly common ballpark figure often associated with live stream services) which is about 10 cents. This is an extremely simplified formula since it does not take into account sponsor exposure for either the paid or free viewer, but as a result each PPV viewer is worth approx 200 free viewers. Rough estimates worked out by people with incomplete information on the Internet have figured that spring arena 2 got approximately 4k paid viewers. This figure is likely a lowball due to an inability to track uniques and how many tuned in and out over the course of 3 entire days. Lets say the lowball is accurate. Those 4k people are worth 800000 free viewers using the traditional model.

Needless to say the numbers I just gave you are conjecture and should not be relied upon. They exist to make a point, that the premium model is actually pretty damn effective. If you watch a restream, big deal. If you were never going to pay anyway you aren't a customer or lost sale. No reason to even acknowledge your existence and as a bonus that traditional media doesn't get, MLG even gets a bunch of extra sponsor exposure. Winners all round!

But the teams gets hurt because less people watch them and see their sponsors! Not really. They get their player travel and accomodation covered. That's Usually a huge expense, especially for Koreans. Totally worth getting fewer eyes on a players jersey which doesn't get shown much on camera anyway. Top 8 even get paid, not bad at all, so a high profile tournament with 1 in 4 getting paid and no cost to the team? Holy shit it's the death of ESPORTS.

The good old fashioned argument is that these events do not bring in new fans. Yeah, that's not what PPV is for in any industry. PPV is used when a fan base for something has reached a mass capable of sustaining it. Is used to extract additional value from hardcore fans. Casual fans don't even factor into the equation. How many people do you think buy Wrestlemania for 50 or so dollars? How many buy PPV boxing or UFC? A hardcore minority, same guys that buy merchandise and other such things. Casual fans here about how awesome the event was and are drawn further into the sport, eventually perhaps becoming hardcore enough to purchase a future PPV event. Its a tried, tested and healthy part of sustainable sports and entertainment industries, something we could learn an awful lot from.

Apologies for typos and weird grammar, typed this all on my iPad on the train back from MLG