Monetization of Speedrunning and Tutoring

So, this pastebin is my collection of thoughts, along with synthesis and evolution of ideas touched upon by other runners.

I will state straight up that Werster's article regarding money in speedrunning, and more specifically, paid tutoring for speedrunning lessons, is probably the single biggest influence regarding this, and some of my points will be directly aimed at Werster. Who of course, has no idea who I am and will never read this.

If you don't feel like reading the entirety of the article, you can get my summary right here:

- While speedrunners have every right whatsoever to monetize and market the skills they've spend thousands of hours working on, consumers would have to be absolute idiots to actually take them up on it. -

In my time speedrunning, I have learned the speedruns for four games. Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals, Mega Man Rock Force, Action Henk, and Earthbound (Boogey%)

Lufia 2 - Deln, Zaenzer, and Viiman at varying points came into my chat to discuss the game and the speedrun.

Mega Man Rock Force - ThePeterAfro came in and is pretty regular whenever I attempt this game.

Action Henk - TetraSlash came in fairly routinely regarding this game. Action Henk will get a little more mention later on due to the odd circumstances.

Earthbound - AndyPerfect and RedBalloonMan have come in pretty routinely to discuss this game, among others.

In the case of Lufia 2 and Earthbound, some of the more prominent, talented runners of this game freely offered advice and critique on my skills and methodology. Mega Man Rock Force is rather obscure, but even still, one of the runners came in to talk, and I sought out other runners regarding the game as well.

Action Henk... there's no speedrun community for it at all. In fact, maybe 12,000 downloads of the game have been made in total. TetraSlash isn't a speedrunner, but was the first person to actually complete the entire game and had great knowledge of Action Henk.

So for the more populated games, there was a ready made knowledge base who freely offered their expertise regarding the speedrun, and for the less populated games, people still found me. While Werster notes that a "lack of accessibility" has been stated as one of the biggest barriers to speedrunning, I wonder if that's for a lack of folks trying it themselves. Or if it's because they don't know or cannot start up their own stream. A lack of people to tell me how to speedrun has never been an issue.

I suppose that right there is the core for why I don't feel like anyone should ever pay for speedrunning lessons; the information's already floating wild and free as is.

This doesn't mean that I am going to chasitise a runner for offering private tutoring lessons. If he has a market of people who want to give him money for what most will offer for free... then more power to him.

It also certainly doesn't mean that I feel like runners OWE private lessons, or any divulging of information, for free. That's not the case at all. If people want you to get on a private skype call and tutor them... then hell yes, you should be charging for that. If charging money cuts down on the people clamoring for your time, then by all means start.

And over all of it, I recognize that individuals make streaming and speedrunning a full time career. I don't fault them for that at all, although I question this decision on many levels (and no, it has nothing to do with being a "Sellout"). If private tutoring lessons are a part of your portfolio, then what the hell, why not?

Since folks will probably point this out, I'll acknowledge the games I have personally run are but a small sample size. And yes, two of the games I got relatively little support when learning (Although there wasn't much of a community to give money to if I wanted to either), so it's very possible that other game communities are much more uptight about talking to new runners.

That's definitely possible, but having been a fan of many other speed games, this free transfer of information has been a part of all of them. It's not that I find fault with the runners trying to sell this... but I've never seen the need for it to be sold for people to learn.

What's your take on it? Feel free to tweet me @dangodofthunder, or talk to me on twitch at twitch.tv/dangodofthunder .