We’ve got a lot of highly skilled and enthusiastic gamers around here, but we need to set our sights on the big leagues: top-tier competitive gamers are now attracting major brand sponsors. The New York Times’ Stephanie Clifford recently highlighted Dr Pepper’s plans to place a professional gamer on bottles that will be distributed nationwide. The player in question is Tom Taylor, a 21-year-old who has a three-year, $250,000 contract to play video games, particularly Halo 3. Taylor, aka Tsquared, will appear on about 175 million bottles from January to April. “Dr Pepper struck the deal with Major League Gaming, a New York City company that organizes teams and competitions.

This year, the league has 50 professional teams, each specializing in one of five multiplayer games, including Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4.” Taylor is one of several players with these increasingly lucrative deals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Mat's Thoughts (twitter: matsmall). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.