Here’s why Professional gamers retire early as compare to athlete belonging to traditional sports

Let’s not go too far, how good a particular player is in the game of cricket we often demand their retirement when they approach near 40 and the only reason we give when someone ask us why do you want this X player to retire as he is doing extremely well at the fag end of his career?

The argument which we give them – It’s high time young player should come in the team in place of the experienced ones. At the end it doesn’t matter if you are Tendulkar, Dhoni, Laxman or let’s say Virat kohli when you reach at the age of 40 they hang their boots for giving opportunity to young players.

A Sportsman life is pretty short if you are a great sportsman like- Tendulkar you can have a prolong career of more than 2 decades but for that you need to start pretty early unlike Master Blaster’s case who debut for India at the age of 16.

But the fact that I am going to tell you about esports industry when it comes to player’s shelf life will shock you if you are not aware about the norms of this industry and have little inclination towards Video Games.

Professional Gamers in Esports retires way early as compare to traditional sports. Let us ponder those reasons in detail.

Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel was touted once the best professional gamer in the world and won 12 Championships and five MVP awards in numerous first person shooter based games like- “Quake III Arena” , “Painkiller” and “Unreal Tournament” and played his last professional match at the age of 26  in 2007 at the end of his gaming career he earned a whooping amount of $458.489 in the prize money.

Traditionally, it is claimed that professional gamers hangs their mice and keywords at such an early age as Esports is a young person’s game.

The athletes starts to wear down physically along with reflexes, hand-eye coordination and mental agility will take a sharp dip once they reaches in their mid 20s.

“It’s baloney,” Dr. Caitlin McGee said

“Yes, there is research that shows us how reaction time changes over time and one of the things that affects reaction time eventually is age. However, the age at which you start to see substantial decline in reaction time is much older than mid 20s.” Dr McGee added who is a physical therapist by profession.

Based on interviews given by four professional Esports players in Washington post where they revealed the other reason why the gamers retire early is stress, overwork, job instability and exploring new avenues.

Basically, the prize money went down a lot,” Wendel said of his decision to retire. “And that’s when I was like, well … If I’m not gonna make money for my time and effort, maybe I can do other things for esports and gaming.”

Now let me share another example with you, Dennis “Thresh” Fong who was one of the mentors of Wendel and based on records stated in Guinness World Records book, former is often called as World’s first professional gamer.

Did you know one of the first-ever prizes in esports was a car? Dennis "Thresh" Fong won a Ferrari in 1997.

Happy National Video Games Day! pic.twitter.com/cGJK3sPbt8

— Esportz Network (@EsportzNetwork) September 12, 2019

Fong played a very important role in popularizing WASD configurations of keyboard movements which is known for controlling first person shooters based games. You would be amazed to know he retired only at the age of 20 way before his pupil-Wendel.

“I was running a company that was reasonably successful and quite large in terms of team size,” Fong said. “We had raised venture funding and I was CEO. So that in itself was incredibly stressful, being 21 years old and running a company for the first time.” Fong said while taking to one of the media outlets in the past.