How To Make A Living Playing Video Games: Esports, Streaming, And Blogging
If gaming was a viable career years ago I might have tried to make it in that field. I still got time, maybe I will make an attempt, if my skills are good enough to the pay the bills. But for you growing up in this time, the ones who are dominating online or the one who know how to entertain while you play, or even the older crowd who still has the reflexes, there is money to made. Your main option is streaming, unless you are good enough to go pro but there are tools like steemit which can help you bring in more revenue than you think.
Esports:
I am going to be honest, you need to be really good to be pro. I am not in the pro league so you will want to do research to find out more if you are interested. But from what I know, from playing online and watching pro tournaments these people are not messing around. You can get a feel of how good the competition is by playing online and if you can play the top people and still hold your own, maybe it is worth looking into. If you play street fighter 5, look into Evo or the road to evo. League of Legends is big in a lot of places and if you are a StarCraft 2 Pro then move to South Korea :p.
Streaming:
Check out twitch or youtube live streams for examples of streamers. If you want to be successful you will probably have to be on camera, or at least have your audio and be entertaining. This does not mean you have to be a good player, just be able to put on a show. If you can do both, well, then you might have something big. When people stream they usually have a camera on them that displays in the corner of the screen while the rest is the game. Newer games tend to be watched more than older ones and there is always L.O.L. which brings in the crowds. Now the problem is, as twitch and youtube are established sites, it will be hard to build up a viewer base. This is where steemit comes in.
Steemit:
This is where I recommend you start if you want to make money for gaming. It is a social media/blogging site that rewards you for your content and content can be anything. There is a growing gaming community here and I am going to start a community for one when the feature is available. You want to stream? Post about when and what and give us some details about you or the gameplay that is coming up. Same if you have clips, you can upload them here, write a blog post about them and you are good to go. This will help raise your views and could get you some good money as well.
Do you make money from gaming, let me know in the comments.
It seems you forget a major field - analytics.
In many games like Dota and LoL there is much room for command tactics and analysing post-game. You need to be a good player indeed but not nessesary pro-level.
Great post. Would be great to get you involved in the gaming initiative we're developing for @hardfork-series, @whatageek.
how cool.. would it have been if youtube or steemit was around like 15 years ago when I was playing online games for like 12 hours aday because I loved it... now making a living out of it would be a dream come true.... maybe I will look into it again... I am just a lot older now and life has taken me in a different direction.
I would be interested, what are the details? I am going through the @hardfork-series page now.
Well i tend to be good at video games
but the most money i make from twitter advertisements
Really? May I ask how that works and how well you do? I am curious.
Welp i deal with CS:GO/PUBG Gambling and i share my affiliate codes on twitter
i make about 5-50$ a month (really depends on the time of the year)
i got 3.3k followers
And i am usually like 60% better than the average in every video game i play
Check out @steemplayroom - You can now play agar and win few dollars in Steem every 30 minutes
I am definitely not good enough at gaming to think people would even want to watch me play, but I hope we see more and more people entering the space! Good players are fun to watch!
You don't have to be good, just entertaining. There are funny streamers who did it as well.
I've tried posting a couple of gaming videos before. They can do well. On Steemit, you might find reviewing games and gaming gear to be really worthwhile as well.
I'm going to try to do some Fortnite videos soon actually. It will be interesting to see how they go.
Nice, best of luck :)
Thank you for the idea . I think I will record while im playing PUBG . 😁😁😁😁
It is definitely a lot more viable these days, I have made a bunch through steemit and my cousin is on Youtube with 40k+ subs and making a lot. So you just need to get started and keep at it!
Nice, keep it up
The fun became less when you play for living unless you're really a good player in Esports game like Dota2 and LOL then the fun comes from beating your competitor ..
Although I have great interest in games, I have never thought of sharing this passion on steemit. After reading this post, I am really considering it and I think it will be a positive concept for me.
Thank You for this post.
The steem blockchain is the best decentralization of government I have seen after 7 years of bitcoin... Steemit is off to the moon. I wouldnt be surprised to see it at $100 by the end of the year. Check this post out @mascott
Esports is the most age sensitive of all of them but they all are careers people can follow in gaming. I noticed you mentioned streaming but you hardly mentioned gaming videos? There a particular reason for that? Both as a creator and a viewer I prefer videos over streams personally. I have a love-hate relationship with editing too because it takes a while but I love some of the creative things I can do with editing. That doesn't really apply to streaming.
I do agree Steemit has a good gaming community. It's interesting seeing what people post. Some people even do the screenshot type of lets plays instead of videos which is that little bit different so it's a cool thing. I prefer videos but that format is cool and that bit different to what you see mostly nowadays. Gaming is not immune to those who are sharing other people's content as their own, which is not cool, but aside from that it is a pretty cool gaming community we are developing here. There's a couple of accounts here too that are quite a reasonable size on other platforms too.
I personally share my YouTube and Dailymotion videos here. I tried using Dtube too but unfortunately I just have too much trouble with Dtube. It shits itself while uploading more than half the time unfortunately plus I find often when trying to watch dtube videos they buffer forever and don't progress to where I have to give up, which sucks since in those cases I miss out on seeing other people's content simply because it won't play. I wish people who upload to Dtube would also upload elsewhere and share that link as well so people don't have to just miss out if dtube isn't working. I think dtube plus Aussie internet is just a bad combination unfortunately.
I don't agree with those who go "you should do it just because you like it and not worry about money at all" but people trying to make an income on here should still be doing what they like and are passionate about rather than making any content to make an income but blind Freddy can see they don't care about what they are making and doing, and people should also be aware that they can make an income doing this, but they shouldn't be expecting to get rich either. Great for them if they do, but most won't. Quite a few regardless of the platform eventually make enough to have a proper income from gaming but they aren't exactly Pewdiepie rich or anything and that's more what people should aim at than being rich. If they instead become rich and make a shittonne that's great but it isn't exactly the most common outcome so people shouldn't go in expecting that and then getting disappointed. The most common outcome is achieving much less than a full time income, but the full time income result is much much more common than the rich person result. Sometimes people get blinded though and expect the top income and I don't blame them, but if someone can get just a normal income through gaming that is an amazing accomplishment in itself and they should be proud of themselves for achieving that. Even working part time but making enough from gaming to work on gaming part time is pretty awesome compared to your only income source being one job.
My story is exactly yours when it comes to Dtube. It's such a great idea on paper, but it has so many issues that I too plan to just stick to YouTube until it improves.
I also agree that videos are more fun than streams. Streams are nice for killing time, but I find myself more invested in gaming videos because, like you said, there's more creativity and greater focus of content.
I wouldn't stop posting on Youtube but you might want to check out Dlive. I discovered yesterday that you can upload video to it - I thought it was only livestreams. I don't know how wrought Dlive is with uploading issues, but the videos play a lot better for me than Dtube ones so that's a good sign at least I guess. I might give it a try next time I upload and see if it works.
It's true, but only videos that are under 2 gb in size (that's close to 25 minutes at 720p), and that only works for some of my videos. The upload time is about the same as YouTube, but I'm a bit dubious to put a lot of eggs in the Dlive basket. It sounds good on paper, so I will keep trying, but I hope that they make the platform more friendly to video uploads and not just livestreams.
It's under 2gb is it? I found an older thing talking about it and it said 1gb so I'm glad it has been upped at least as 1gb isn't much. I found out the hard way with my most recent video that Dailymotion doesn't allow over 2 gb either. I'll just handbrake any videos that are larger than 2gb for the websites. Handbrake works great for compressing videos and making them smaller without a very noticeable difference in quality (depending on how much you compress it of course). And certainly I wouldn't put all your eggs in Dlive. I'm not recommending stopping posting on YouTube. I'm talking about putting your videos in both places. I'm thinking about trying it on top of YT and Dailymotion myself. People here like the platforms unique to steemit so I think if it can work it pays off to do both but if it is as much trouble as dtube was for me its not really. Yeah I upload overnight as Australian internet isn't the best so the upload time is only an issue if it is so bad it is still uploading in the morning.
Just thought I'd let you know, I've now done a bit of uploading to dlive and so far it is working beautifully (touch wood). If you needed to get versions of some videos that were over 2GB to be under to be able to be on there, Handbrake is a good way to make them smaller without too much noticeable change in quality which is what I did with one of mine that was too big. Good luck with whatever you choose but just thought you might want to know that from one person's experience at least it appears to work quite nicely and not have the issues dtube has.
I actually tried to upload a couple videos recently and give it another shot, but both videos uploaded to about 90% completion and then just froze. I waited for almost 8 hours, but it was entirely stuck. The moment I did anything with the page, it lost all the data and I'd have to start all over again.
I'll keep trying, but I swear I keep having the worst luck with Dlive, lol
Oh that sucks. Sorry to hear that. I've only had issues like that on dtube so far so I thought maybe dlive was free of those issues (mostly - ofc it won't be free of those issues completely, even YouTube sometimes has issues like that, just rarely).