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How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

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Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#171
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this is nothing new. Some streamers are even dipping their toes into game development (Reynad, for example; he's making a competitor for Blizzard's Hearthstone).

The iPhone presented nothing new. The Dr is a 2 time world champion (back to back-93/94, no less!) as well as an industry VETERAN! He designed half the maps in COD Advanced Warfare. He's a 6 foot frickin 8 athletic powerhouse too. Ya'll mask your jealousness poorly.

this is such a ridiculous comment that i felt i had to make an account to let you know.

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone presented nothing new. The Dr is a 2 time world champion (back to back-93/94, no less!) as well as an industry VETERAN! He designed half the maps in COD Advanced Warfare. He's a 6 foot frickin 8 athletic powerhouse too. Ya'll mask your jealousness poorly.

this is such a ridiculous comment that i felt i had to make an account to let you know.

The Dr is ridiculously handsome, ridiculously talented, ridiculously speedy, ridiculously violent, with a ridiculous amount of momentum.

He changed the stream game in ways that only Steve Jobs would understand. Much like the late great he took what everyone was doing and brought it up to a level way beyond what the sidekick competition was capable.

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#173

My favorite streamer for Overwatch, aimbotCalvin has 300,000 subscribers. This puts into perspective how much he makes. Wow.

Another WoW streamer like the guy from the article (this ones named Zach) was streaming to 8k+ concurrent viewers for over a year without taking the offer to become a Twitch partner. He turned it on and got some ~3k subscribers in the first week.

He was probably making alright donation income, but suddenly having your monthly income jump ~$12000 a month from just flipping a switch is pretty nuts.

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#174
post #9

What I think is crazy is that this industry exists at the scale it does. It has replaced reality TV for a segment of the world population. There are legions of people that watch these streams, just to watch someone doing something that they could do themselves (but maybe not win as much). This isn't like F1 racing where I'll never be able to afford a racecar, or football where I don't want to exercise. Most of the ki…

To answer the question, I would say yes that's often the case. Even very successful people, and perhaps especially very successful people, are prone to biases. It's hard to argue against your own biases, especially those that have done well by you.

That being said, I don't "get it" insofar as it's not something I particularly want to do or partake of. But, plenty of my peers do and I can see that there is an appeal to them the way that watching professional sports is appealing to me. To each their own, right? If you rewind back enough, you'd laugh at the thought of 'professional' sports, as the concept of professionalism of games that children play was far-fetched.

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#175
post #6

This is very much like sports - very few make it to the top, and it's kind of subsidised by the ones coming up or just idly watching. Unlike actual sport, the disciplines here change rapidly, in spite of Blizzard's best efforts, World of Warcraft numbers are rapidly dwindling so a WoW start will pretty much have to start from scratch in another game or quit streaming as a career move. Game developers or even petty mi…

> World of Warcraft numbers are rapidly dwindling so a WoW start will pretty much have to start from scratch in another game or quit streaming as a career move.

It seems you are conflating Twitch streaming with e-sports, they are two very different things. Becoming a successful Twitch streamer doesn't necessarily require extraordinary skills in terms of playing a given game; switching to a new game wouldn't be that big of a deal and some streamers switch regularly on a weekly or daily basis (e.g. my favourite streamer, who is a full-time Twitch streamer and has 175k followers, plays more or less regularly at least 5-6 different games).

I agree with you on the "big brother" part, but then again this is a characteristic of any career path that can potentially lead to notoriety (acting, pro sports, etc).

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#176
post #16

No mention of Dr. Disrespect - a Twitch persona who recently won "Streamer of the Year" at the Esports Industry Awards. Just a passing mention of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, a game which according to some is growing faster than Minecraft did. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) is the most popular streamed game on Twitch right now. The game regularly has over 2,000,000 concurrent players, has sold over 13,000,000…

Arguably, PUBG's success is completely attributable to it being a spectacularly fun game to watch and therefore RIDICULOUSLY popular on Twitch.

I don't think it's anywhere near as popular without the Twitch streams

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#177
post #6

This is very much like sports - very few make it to the top, and it's kind of subsidised by the ones coming up or just idly watching. Unlike actual sport, the disciplines here change rapidly, in spite of Blizzard's best efforts, World of Warcraft numbers are rapidly dwindling so a WoW start will pretty much have to start from scratch in another game or quit streaming as a career move. Game developers or even petty mi…

> World of Warcraft numbers are rapidly dwindling so a WoW start will pretty much have to start from scratch in another game or quit streaming as a career move. It seems you are conflating Twitch streaming with e-sports, they are two very different things. Becoming a successful Twitch streamer doesn't necessarily require extraordinary skills in terms of playing a given game; switching to a new game wouldn't be that b…

I don't think he's conflating the two at all. He's just pointing out that the vast majority of streamers start out by building a following around a single game, and very few succeed enough to make decent money and jump from game to game like your favourite streamer does.

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#178

> Garcia’s specialty is the multiplayer fantasy game World of Warcraft. While he isn’t its best player, he has a knack for talking entertainingly over his play : he is funny, brash, and filled with stories about his delinquent childhood in Newark. Most, if not all, of the live gameplay videos nowadays mostly tend to be about screaming and raging at the screen with lesser amount of stories. And for some reason people…

this is way less true of twitch than it is of youtube. i'd say the typical twitch channel is someone casually playing some game while participating in the chat and keeping it going by asking questions or talking about their life

Re: How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

#180
post #6

This is very much like sports - very few make it to the top, and it's kind of subsidised by the ones coming up or just idly watching. Unlike actual sport, the disciplines here change rapidly, in spite of Blizzard's best efforts, World of Warcraft numbers are rapidly dwindling so a WoW start will pretty much have to start from scratch in another game or quit streaming as a career move. Game developers or even petty mi…

> World of Warcraft numbers are rapidly dwindling so a WoW start will pretty much have to start from scratch in another game or quit streaming as a career move. It seems you are conflating Twitch streaming with e-sports, they are two very different things. Becoming a successful Twitch streamer doesn't necessarily require extraordinary skills in terms of playing a given game; switching to a new game wouldn't be that b…

Yes, it's more akin to being a top youtuber. Being entertaining is the number one factor, being good at the game is a second.
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