Payment-Services (Insider, Vip & Co)
Insider, VIP, Lounge, Premium, Prime, Plus or Backstage. Nowadays it seems to be a status symbol for a competitive online gaming team to have such a payment-service. Nearly all big teams like SK and NiP offer for their fans this kind of services.
Usually you have to pay for these kind of services 5-7 € a month. But is actually a fair price? This is a hard question to answer. Normally the teams offer features like: “ask team XY”, “exclusive downloads” and “exclusive servers”. The teams often publish special guides and videos for their paying fans as well.
This actually doesn’t sound toobad. But in reality it is far worse than you might expect it to be. Often you can get these exclusive downloads from other pages. The guides are mostly only interesting for beginners and all the other features are rubbish anyway.
But there are some good reasons for these services as well:
The thing is a sports team needs income out side of sponsors. With football teams they have their television rights, merchandise and most of all ticket sales.
eSports teams however don't have or barely have any of those three things mentioned so they need to come up with other ways to get their budgets in balance.
(SK|iantje)
After all, I recon that at the moment these services are improving and hopefully soon it will be a good thing to spend money on. If you really want to support a team and Sign-Up for one of these Payment-Services, then choose either SK.Insider or NiP|ViP. For German eSport fans mouz.Backstage is probably the best choice. You definitely shouldn’t spend your money on any other Payment-Service.