This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

　　Reddit user Teh_Skully took the opportunity to pose Valve's CEO Gabe Newell a question on his (as of writing) ongoing Reddit AMA. The question centered around the growing popularity of competitive gaming, as well as the ongoing way that the fans can interact with the prize pools of tournaments in both CS:GO and Dota 2. His question yielded the following response from Newell:

　　We still think we have a long way to go to get to the point where all of the different people that are contributing value to competitive play get everything out of it that they should. Feels like we are making good progress though. Giving the consumers of content a direct relationship with the creators of content is something we think about a lot. That is what drove our thinking about how the community could be more involved in the tournaments that mattered to them.

　　Aside from Valve's way of allowing fans to increase the prize pools of tournaments, organizers are now also looking in to ways of contributing to teams participating in their tournaments. DreamHack are currently employing the strategy of splitting the revenue they gain from their stream to the participating teams as extra incentive. This is in addition to the sales of their own league compendium, which currently guarantees every team in attendance a minimum of roughly $3,000.

　　DreamHack's Project Manager, Christian Lord, had the following to say about their stance on sharing revenues with the participating teams:

　　ASUS ROG DreamLeague is the first time that DreamHack actively is working with the teams. It was a key component actually from the start, without the teams support and involvement our league wouldn't be possible to organize it the way we like.

　　Of course there is a lot that we still are working on and will improve but it was important from the start to build a structure where the teams and players could benefit from the leagues success. Therefore we decided early that the teams would get a part of the Twitch revenues the league generates. We are also very happy to see the great success of our Dota 2 Ticket which includes Compendium, Fantasy League, Items and most importantly 25% of the sales going the prize pool. Even the jumbo in our League will get $3,200 at this point and it's increasing every day (total prize pool right now is over $164,000).

　　But it's not only about supporting the teams with revenue streams, but also giving them league reports, viewership statistics and making sure that the team brands are the center of attention and the players getting star recognition.

　　Gabe Newell's Reddit AMA can be found here.

　　Image Credit: Gabe Newell, dualshockers.net