Summary
Apex Legends players are always looking for the next challenge. Three-stacking in ranked gets boring when you and your teammates are the best in the world, and ALGS competition is exciting but infrequent. Any way to keep the competitive scene fresh and earn a little more money is welcomed with open arms.
Enter Realm. The esports tournament provider broke into theApex Legendsscene last year, offering eye-watering $150,000 prize pools for a ranked-style league competition, including an exciting solo queue system, so players had to manage with random teammates – albeit they were all professional players. However, it all shut down in a fiery mess ofsocial media beef and fake news allegations.
Somehow, Realm Returned
Realm is returning this month, and players are fresh with enthusiasm for the system, seemingly forgetting the allegations of late payments and allegedly needing a crypto wallet in order to receive any money you did win.
Cryptocurrency is a shady business, and its effects on esports have been devastating. Multiple esports organisations have been shut down or gutted completely after crypto investments and partnerships went south. Cloud9, The Guard, CLG, and evenTSMcan attest to that, and many in the space are cautious of crypto because they’ve been burned before.
The entire Realm platform is built on the blockchain. It uses a company called Hedera to back up tournament results, statistics, and leaderboards on the crypto system. There’s no good reason to do this over standard scorekeeping, but the rot goes deeper.
How To Play Realm Apex Legends Tournaments
As well as hosting tournaments for the very best Apex Legends players, Realm offers a fantasy game, much like those for football and other sports. But this fantasy game is different.
To start off, you’re given ten common cards based on current players. These can be upgraded through rarities Sapphire, Diamond, Obsidian, and Opal based on players’ real life performances. There’s a points scoring system based on your players, but the whole thing is undermined by the fact that you can buy new players with real money.
There’s no budget to manage, no delicate balancing act to ensure you may afford ImperialHalandGenburten in your squad. You can just pay to have the best players. And how do you pay, exactly? It’s all obfuscated and hidden, but with the blockchain background of the rest of the platform, it’s safe to wager that these trading cards are NFTs.
Where Does Realm’s Money Come From?
When buying a fantasy asset, essentially a digital trading card with a pretty border, the seller (another user like you) gets 70 percent of the value, the player whose likeness it is gets 20 percent, and Realm takes a ten percent cut. However, it’s not all good news for the professionals involved.
If you check out the terms and conditions for playing in a Realm tournament, there’s a clause which allows the company to use and distribute your name, likeness, persona, picture, voice, “by any and all means, media, devices, processes and technology now or hereafter known or devised anywhere in the universe at any time perpetuity, for any lawful purpose whatsoever”. For so many of these players, their name is their brand, their career is based entirely around this, and granting a shady company that has already shut down once complete freedom to use you in any way they see fit would undermine your own brand and opportunities.
Sure, currently the players can make a little money off these trading cards, but is that worth signing away all of your rights to your name, voice, and face?
There’s a small shining light in all this. Realm hasupdated its about pagesince it ceased Apex operations last year, adding in a sentence that, “Players opt in to have their card played in the fantasy game”. However, this is not legally binding, unlike the terms and conditions. This opt-in option could be revoked at any time, as could the percentage revenue be reduced to nothing with no recourse.
Everything about Realm screams scam. It has previous allegations about not fulfilling its required payouts. It is still pushing NFTs in 2024. It has dodgy terms and conditions that practically sign your life away in return for a few pennies. But I can guarantee that it will be full of streamers and pro players because there’s nothing else out there.
Grassroots esports is improving, but the gap between that and the top tier of gaming competition is enormous, especially in Apex Legends. Pro players are practically forced into playing every competition that rears its head, however dodgy, whatever the terms, because this isn’t a sustainable industry with regular paid tournaments.
In a perfect world, esports would be like tennis or golf, where players could earn enough from the regular circuit that they wouldn’t have to debase themselves or forfeit their rights to a company shilling NFTs. But the call of $150,000 is more than the vast majority of pro players make in a year, so who can blame them for entering? The bills won’t pay themselves.
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