The Slow Poison of an eSports Player's Career: Burnout is Getting to Him

In theory, playing games is about having fun and relaxing. But what happens when it becomes work, a life routine and takes up most of your time? Do professional eSports players enjoy the competition?

An eSports career is by no means a pure idyll. To stay at the top, players have to subordinate their entire lives to competition. Long hours of training, lots of trips to tournaments, separation from family and friends. All of this adds up to enormous stress and a lot of mental strain. And yet the game should be pure pleasure for them.

The Road to the Top is Winding and Steep

Every eSports player's career starts with pure passion. Commitment and dedication to the title you love are the foundation. After all, the desire to develop further and the enthusiasm to compete do not come from nothing. Over time, new opportunities and possibilities arise to try your hand at a more professional level.

A great career, however, requires sacrifices. Individual training for each athlete can last up to several hours a day. We are not only talking about refining mechanical skills, but also about working with a team, consulting together and developing strategies. An approach that is too light-hearted will not be without consequences. Competition does not sleep – everything will take its toll on performance. In the current era of eSports, a player needs to keep himself in shape all the time, because there is no shortage of candidates to replace him in a certain team.

The preconceived assumption "eSports is something for me" is wrong. Only after experiencing everything for yourself can you decide further on this topic. If players don't give up after many years in the profession, it is most often at the beginning of their adventure because they decide that they don't want to tie their life to it after all. It is not all that simple.

eSports Players Losing the Fun of the Game?

The topic of burnout in eSports or declining motivation has come up more than once. CS: GO and VALORANT player Timothy "autimatic,” for example, mentioned it. According to the American, over the years of his eSports career he began to lose the fun of the game itself. It became his job, a way of earning a living. This does not mean that he lost his passion and stopped enjoying the competition, but he undoubtedly started to look at everything differently.

A few days ago, Aidan "rocker" Grodin announced the end of his career. The 19-year-old had been playing professionally in Apex Legends for two years as a representative of Cloud9 and NRG – the top American organisations. As the reason for his decision, “rocker” simply cited burnout and loss of enjoyment of the game.

“I'm done with Apex. I fooled myself for a while that I got satisfaction from the game, but ultimately that's not the case. I can't enjoy it for more than 2 hours. I am tired of the competition.”

It is worth recalling that the crisis of the most deserving team in CS: GO history, Astralis, started with the need for a break reported by two of the team's players. The reason was simply fatigue and just burnout. The two players did not want to give up their careers at all, but when they resumed them again, the level of competition overwhelmed them. We are referring to Lukas "gla1v" Rossander and Andreas "Xyp9x" Højsleth. These brief pauses in 2020 indirectly ended Astralis' era of dominance.

This is why eSports can sometimes be a tough piece of bread. These days, players take care of themselves comprehensively. Every top team works with a psychologist. Physical training is organised and there is a lot of activity outside the game itself. Of course, the many hours of classic in-game training have remained the core of preparation, but these are not based on this alone. It has been realised that with empty work it is not possible to achieve all goals.

A player's mental health can also affect his result in a match. This factor is very important to monitor if you bet online. One of the top eSports betting sites is https://ggbetss.com/en. At this bookmaker you can bet on Dota 2 or Valorant at favorable odds. GGBet is the most famous site in the gaming community, so you can not doubt its reliability. In addition to betting GGBet provides news and statistics with which you can track the results of players and the team as a whole to make a correct prediction.

Burnout or loss of satisfaction with the game is slowly killing the careers of eSports players, if they themselves allow it. It's not a bad thing to catch a slight crisis or doubt the meaning of your work. The issue is knowing how to get out of it and back on track.