Fans fund almost $1 million of extra cash for the ALGS Championship in 3 days
This is issue #50 of The Final Circle, a newsletter about Apex
EA announced on Tuesday that special item bundles sold in the Apex store would contribute to extra cash in the prize pool of the $1 million ALGS Championship.
By Thursday, buyers of the bundles had raised over $800,000, nearly halfway to EA’s self-imposed cap of an extra $2 million potentially added to the Championship prize pool.
This style of crowdfunding esports prize pools on a massive scale was made popular by DOTA 2’s tournament The International, hosted by Valve, which boasts prize purses that beggar belief: The International currently holds every spot in the top 5 largest tournament prize pools in all of esports, and this year’s edition is set to dispense over $40 million in prize money.
It’s an excellent model for the esports ecosytem in Apex, which, I think it’s safe to say, struggles to attract support from major brands willing to shell out tens of millions of dollars on esports prize pools. (No disrespect to Monster Energy and Lenovo Legion!)
Luckily, legions of Apex fans stepped up. This week’s windfall proves that players are more than willing to support the ALGS with their wallets going forward.
The four item bundles each cost roughly $25 (depending on how many Apex coins you float to get them), but you can nab all four at a 10% discount for $90. Setting aside the nominal discount for buying big batches of coins, that means EA puts $5 into the Championship prize pool for each $25 bundle players purchase, and if you buy them as a set, EA puts $20 into the prize pool.
This arrangement gives the company roughly 80% of the initiative’s money, leaving players with a modest 20% of the revenue from a sale ostensibly orchestrated to support them.
But setting aside the the self-imposed cap of an extra $2 million to the prize pool (why?) and the miserly revenue split, this is almost certainly the best thing that’s happened in competitive Apex since the Poland LAN, a major showcase of the game’s popularity and a huge boon to players. After all, the Championship prize pool will likely triple in size, offering the possibility of life-changing money to many of these players.
Ultimately, experiments like this aren’t really about the dramatic increase to the prizes awarded to players—it’s about finding a sustainable path forward for Apex esports. It’s a bit tired to discuss whether these tournaments (particularly online-only competitions) are genuine competitive environments or just a glorified marketing exercise for giant corporations, but at the end of the day, it makes little sense for EA to pour money into an esports scene that can’t financially justify its existence. Lest we forget, the ongoing Apple vs. Epic case revealed in documents just recently that industry giant Epic overestimated their 2019 Fortnite esports revenue by $154 million dollars. That was the year of the sold-out Arthur Ashe Stadium Fortnite World Cup and a high-water mark of esports in the popular imagination, and an absolutely massive budget shortfall. It’s prudent and savvy for EA to secure funding for Apex esports in a way that shows off the game’s enthusiastic community, which has always been one of its greatest strengths.
Everything else:
The Group Stage of the ALGS Championship starts tomorrow for Asia Pacific North, Asia Pacific South, and South America, beginning three weeks of high-stakes Apex action that conclude with North America finals on June 13th. Just between us, I haven’t quite mastered how this format is going to work! But all you really need to know is that there’s Championship Apex starting tomorrow.
Apex wonk (and friend of the newsletter) Singh Labs deals out excellent data-supported arguments in their Championship Power Rankings:
Organizers shuffled squads (at least) twice to deal out a fair $50,000 Twitch Rivals competition yesterday, probably in response to criticism of past tournaments where a select few teams dominated the field. But any event combining professionals with amateurs inevitably leads to some crazy mismatches in skill. Personally, I enjoyed watching Albralelie and other pros turn into absolute demons, but it’s not to everyone’s taste:
Japanese YouTuber and humble damage farmer RakyThought breaks the world record for damage done in a single game with 10,864. Highly recommend the video for its JRPG item shop music and smooth-brain Spitfire-spamming content.
Journalist (and The Final Circle subscriber) Ben Sledge interviewed Nessy at The Loadout, who’ve been teasing a big org announcement for some time. The interview shows how precarious pro Apex can be, even for one of the best rosters in the EU, and it was great to see such a candid and detailed discussion of the financial calculus in Apex. Though Graceful said the team “had the contract in their hands, and G2 pulled out,” I’d love to know more about that—I’d be curious to see what G2 has to say.
Starting May 24th, GLL will no longer host weekly Community Cup tournaments for South America, Asia and Pacific regions, in an effort to “make each tournament as good as possible.” The remaining two weekly Community Cup tournaments will be played on Frankfurt (EU) and Iowa (NA) servers. This is the second time GLL has scaled back its Community Cup offerings in just a couple of months.
