How To Make A Living Playing Video Games: Esports, Streaming, And Blogging

in gaming •  6 years ago 

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.

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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.

Great post. Because of Steemit any content is possible income revenue. Even doing stupid things video lol. This platform has a very bright future. So what we are going to do? Hold thy Steem coin bags!

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).

I tried to stream, but not entirely for the money though, no idea why, but streaming and talking makes gameplay more enjoyable, even if I stream to nobody, I talk to myself, gameplay still feels so much better than just sitting and playing a game. My friend recommended Steemit, I have NO idea how to start or what to do, so I'm watching stuff people posted, to see how it actually works. Great post by the way!

Getting Steemit into the profile is a great idea. Thanks!

When it comes to Gaming, personally I'm involved in three ways.

A weekly live (German) podcast I'm part of which has a slowly but steadily growing community. But it has taken us 3+ years to get there.

I also stream on YT, Twitch & Smashcast (after they bought Hitbox.tv, which in my experience was the best for people starting out new).

The new Twitch tiered partner model is also a bit fairer than the one they had before. To at least get the first benefits of a Twitch affiliate, you have to stream about two to three times a week.

If you want to stream on all three platforms - or even more - at the same time, I'd suggest take a look at restream.io. It's just one of many services that allows you to stream to multiple platforms. And - as hinted at - all three platforms have their edges & drawbacks.

The main advantage of streaming of course is the fact that it allows you to play with your audience in many ways, if you are creative.
E.g. in one stream series I was playing Rimworld. When the going in the game had slow moments, I'd play games like "Hangman" or "What am I?" with the viewers. It's a lot of fun - both for the streamer and for the viewer. And something you cannot do with a YT Video. For me Streaming is all about interactivity.

And - lastly - I also make gaming videos. Mostly machinimas - so short movies done with gaming content - and the occasional Let's Play.

Mind you, I've done none of those for the money. If you are in it for the money and manage to not lose your soul in the process, you'll face streaming, editing, looking for royalty free music pieces every day.

Congrats! It's now your job! I prefer to keep it as my hobby. ;)

Nowadays there are loads of ways to make a living from gaming and you don't even have to be that good at it.

Once you have a unique thing to offer your golden! i.e personality, gaming abilities etc. (A good player or bad player is better than an average player)

If you record your gaming via Twitch or YouTube:

  • Advertising income
  • followers from gameplay. (take viewers on a journey to learn/play/cheat the game)
  • Use Patreon or many other crowd funding alternatives. (monthly donations from fans)
  • Review new games then promote them with an affiliate link.
  • Buy/sell weapons on Steam and demo the game ONLY using the weapon your selling.
  • Wear your own brand of clothing when recording gameplay such as a slogan T-shirt, baseball cap etc and offer the same items for sale.
  • Live streaming via twitch and Youtube comment charges.
  • Have your own affiliate advertising in videos you upload.
  • contact your followers via email to promote new games and accessories.
  • use other social platforms for all the above FB, Twitter, Pinterest and other video sites.
  • Have your own website with VIP members area for paying subscribers who see new videos 7 days before everyone else plus exclusive content.
  • Also, on your website have your own advertising, affiliate links, dropship products, own branded products etc.
  • Sell compilation videos with behind the scenes footage when you have enough followers.
  • When you have over 50,000 followers find yourself some sponsors.
  • Work alongside other Gamers who have their own followers to share customers.
  • Have a gaming competition that requires a user/fan/follower to take action on something.
  • Finally, upload your videos and blog posts on Steem.

I think gaming is a great way to earn an income if your enjoy playing and you have the confidence to record your gameplay. I imagine there is loads more you could do as this list only took me 5mins.

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Spot on. Streamers these days have a lot of potential when you have decent audience. A strong and entertaining team will help build the attention.

I just got back from GamersAssembly in France and they have a growing eSports over there with big prize money for Fortnite etc tournaments. But it takes time to get good at any one game.
Get yourselves to one of these events.

Also guys, check out https://www.bananatic.com and at the time of writing you can earn bananas for playing games and exchange them for vouchers and stuff.

nice post, even i like gaming .
always had a dream to be a good player :( alas couldnt be .
Now slowly leaving it, have to give time to my life :D

Welp saya berurusan dengan CS: GO / PUBG Gambling dan saya berbagi kode afiliasi saya di twitter
saya menghasilkan sekitar 5-50 $ sebulan (benar-benar tergantung pada waktu dalam setahun)
saya mendapat pengikut 3.3k

Dan saya biasanya lebih suka 60% daripada rata-rata di setiap gim video yang saya mainkan.

I like your dtube blog

I really think Esports and all this Internet is our future.
What do you think, is Steemit and all this cryptocurreny our future?
I think so.

<3

This post has received a 38.31 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @whatageek.

I have not idea about gaming but I have friens are living working in that and they are getting really good money, but they dedicate like 9 hours per day. Thanks for the tips!

soy jugador regular de league of legends y de world of warcraft, no soy un profesional pero creo que podría entretener a la gente mientras juego, al fin y al cabo pienso que mas allá de competir la finalidad de un juego es entretener, buen post!

I personaly only gets cash by playing streams on twitch and youtube but I wasn't succesful there either. I choose to play games what I like, not what everyones likes thats maybe my problem :P

Is it better to stream or doing video gameplays? What is faster to grow and make money?

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Thank you @whatageek, for this post. I think this is what I needed today.
Im striving to make the best content I can ,unfortunately its hard for me to stream ath the moment without buying a more expensive internet package but I feel a little relieved by you post concerning the communities when that feature is available . Until then I'll be giving it my all.

  ·  6 years ago Reveal Comment

Play games and get paid.
What a life that would be.

  ·  6 years ago Reveal Comment

This post caught my eye - and is the first one I click on on my first explore of the Trending Posts here on Steemit. I’m new, still thinking and coming up with ideas of what to write about.

I agree that e-Sports is something worth putting your time into, as a professional player or even as a growing community. In my country it’s still rather a small community but it is definitely growing, with a small but very successful group taking it to international levels of recent events.

I hope to write about them soon, thanks for the inspiration.

  ·  6 years ago (edited)

awesome post ❤ i am also a gamer but i am new in this society.i would like to follow you so i can learn manythings from your post.

help me to support me. thank you😊

Great post

You mentioned about blogging and I blog a lot. Not just steemit but on few reputed sites out there. You are right about making a living out of blogging, but was looking for some ideas here. No issues, may be you can come up with a post with more ideas for people like me.. :)

great video upvoted and resteamed. got yourself a follow aswell now

You should check out p2l.tv and play2live :)

I am new to steemit kindly check out my introductory post
You comment are welcome
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@mclongman/steemit-have-a-brief-introduction-about-mr

You got a 18.66% upvote from @postpromoter courtesy of @whatageek!

Want to promote your posts too? Check out the Steem Bot Tracker website for more info. If you would like to support the development of @postpromoter and the bot tracker please vote for @yabapmatt for witness!

  ·  6 years ago Reveal Comment

I don't think i can make a living out of it because i rather do it for fun, i think if it was my job it would not be fun anymore.

Congratulations @whatageek!
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nice post..

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Wow this is an interesting post, really wish i can be making money from every game i love playing.

I've been posting my gaming videos on Steemit for a while, and I've been making gaming videos for over a year, but the biggest problem I find is audience interaction. Although I have nearly 200 followers, I don't see many people leaving comments or interacting (unless they're bots).
I think that interaction is important if any content creator wants to understand their audience and cater to their entertainment proclivities, but it's very difficult when you're met with silence.
My subs on YouTube will occasionally leave comments, and it's great when I can have a conversation with them. But that doesn't seem to be the case on Steemit.
Do any other content creators have this problem?

Couldn't agree more with this post. You CAN make it on platforms like twitch and youtube but it takes months to get a good audience. Then longer to actually start making an income stream from the audience. The streamer would have to be comfortable talking to themselves a lot without any interaction. That was difficult for me, I know I have great entertainment value but the struggle was real waiting for people to come in and stay.

That is why I came to Steemit. The first night I streamed on Dlive I had 75 viewers and the count was climbing. While this is still low I was still excited that people were hanging out. This gives streamers hope to continue. Also the first night I streamed I made money. I love this platform and will continue streaming and hopfully more will come to see me. Great points OP!

I am very afraid of what my parents and society will think of me playing games as a streamer while in the age of 27+, I am so afraid of humiliation and rejection by everyone that now i am thinking of quitting gaming.. what should i do??

Don't give up on what you love.
We are not the minority, we are the quiet majority.

The universe gives us what we need!

Gaming is the only way and Steemit and Dlive are the future.

Finally a platform for people to fulfill their destiny.

Best of luck to all of you!

Really hope to be getting payed for gaming

What games are you playing? What do you think of the future of physical esports like VR sports?

I personally think the future of VR is bringing concerts and live events to the home. I don't know how active people will be with VR eSports. Most people play video games because they don't want to or simply can't do the same things physically IRL.

Most VR games are great for immersion in stories or exploration or open world games. I don't know that a basketball VR game will have much of a following as a lot of gamers are couch potatoes IMO

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Hey people!!! Let's create our own hashtag for example #whatageekarmy so we can support our gaming content. I think is a great idea!!!
Using this method even small steemians like me can accomplish success in creating content and earning on that.

I'd love to be able to do this. Sadly, I live in Venezuela and Internet connection is ridiculously slow. Streaming isn't an option and uploading a video to YouTube takes hours... That is of course if you even have access to the proper equipment. Getting a good computer or game console is extremely expensive and not many can afford it.

It’s an interesting world we live in where teens have the potential to make more than their parents. Not a bad thing at all just different than when I was a kid

helpful post...thanks ... how can we get more revenue?

This generation of little kids are going to have soooooo many options on how to make money in the future!

I'm gaming for the first time in decades and posting it on steemit. Damn it's fun, but I doubt my old school game will have much of an audience. I'm currently posting on youtube first and then pasting the code here. It's easy and I hear posting from other sources is a lot harder. Hopefully that will change soon.

Yea the amount of skill and time the pros put into it is enormous! I was watching a lot of Super Smash Bros Melle and Smash 4 Tournaments a lot a couple years ago and was just in awe of the mental fortitude and technical skill of players like Zero, Armada, Void, Mew2King, Leffen etc.

Like you got into above it's kind of crazy how different the landscape is now if you want to get paid for gaming. Back when I played a ton the only way you could really get paid for it was to be a video game tester, but I think you had to be a certain age and no one really knew how to get those jobs.

Congratulations! I like the post very much hope you can post beautiful ly, please, please, please give an upvote @iamhja

Idea has been jumping in my head long enough, even before my day jerb went south, main problem would probably be stable internet and admittedly, some anxiety.

Once I get my ducks lined up I may have a crack at it this weekend.

Gracias excelente publicación. @whatageek

I have never seen or was interested in live streams until I saw them here on Steemit dLive, that is so cool to see people you follow and admire play a game and entertain you. This is really worth a while. I would love to stream Counter Strike Source, but can't get it to work well on my old a mac book pro because it does not have a good video card. But when I get a new one will be very cool to try it out.

Greetings friend, good information. With a good computers and a fast connection to the internet it would be excellent to earn money playing Video Games .. .

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Great job

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In today's IOT trends you don't need to have much skill to be honest.
No.1 trending in streaming and youtube at today's date would be Fortnite, and streaming for example Tibia wouldn't get you much. On the other hand if you go along trends, there's no 100% chance you can get solid community along thousand other people streaming and making videos about the same day. I would say you need to be a little original, and make creative content, something that everyone could find their piece of content they enjoy, but nowadays huge percent of community are kids, which has advantage in numbers on social media.
Conclusion : Make content you like, enjoy, and talk a lot, people like me for example, like to sit, and listen to some solid arguments, people that talk about interesting stuff, and they also give u room to think about that, but make your points solid so that they would be like "hey, that guy is right if u give it a thought".

Hey Whatageek,

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I have jumped into blogging and it seems to be starting very slowly. I'm also gonna tryout YouTube and Twitch.
Wish me luck!

really a very interesting post, a lot of games I have played, but there is no one who provides income for me. thank you for sharing, hopefully after trying again I will succeed.

good article

Parents used to tell their kids not to play video games because they thought it was just waste time and didn't bring any value. Now things change.

Now we can do a lot of things and make money that couldn't be imagined before. It is so exciting!

I started to get into Streaming on twitch around Christmas time and I've managed to make a little bit of pocket money (around £20) with donations and affliations from Humble Bundle . I tend gety viewers who come for the game and stay for the banter/laughs.

I like the idea of steemit , but I'm finding its Dlive / Dtube platforms to be either lacking in options / functionality or they just don't work . I tend to have a lot of issues when uploading to dtube , and the packet loss with dlive streams just kills it as a platform for me . ( I have no issues uploading/streaming to Twitch/ YT etc) So for the moment I'm gonna have to watch Steemit gaming from the sidelines.

Hey hippcelt, I am currently streaming on twitch as well, and was considering trying Dlive, but had issues viewing streams, let alone trying to stream myself, which from what you have said sounds like it isn't viable at present. But given that, I'm curious if you post your streams to Steemit as a blog post when you go live?
Thanks!

I'd never thought of doing that to be honest.probably will now.