Twitch Is Creating Gaming Millionaires
Video streaming star Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has been snatched away from Twitch by Microsoft’s Mixer platform for an undisclosed sum of money. Video game streaming is now enormously popular with the figures speaking for themselves. In “Ninja’s” case, here are the numbers:
- 14.7 million followers on Twitch
- 1 million followers joined him on Mixer in five days
- 21 million subscribers on his YouTube channel
- Paid $1 million in 2019 by EA to play Apex Legends on his Twitch channel
- Earns around $500,000 a month by playing games
He also has numerous other sponsorship deals and presumably lawyers and accountants to take care of the small print. To be honest I had no idea that game streaming was such a lucrative market. In fact, eSports is a multi-million dollar industry with huge pots of prize money and I only wish I was a little defter with my keyboard to be able to play games for money all day.
Fortnite Millionaires
The Fortnite World Cup has just finished with 16-year-old Kyle Giersdorf aka “Bugha” winning $3 million in prize money. A total $30 million prize pool was available in the event, with runners up Harrison Chang, 24, coming in second place, winning $1.8 million and 16-year-old Shane Cotton winning $1.2 million. Staggering amounts of money for youngsters to win but it’s not all good news with the taxman also getting his cut. For example, the winner will have to pay a “prize-winning tax” of 8.82% ($264,600) to the state of New York and federal tax of $1,182,000 million, leaving him with half of what he originally won so I imagine the lawyers and accountants are queueing up his door as we speak. Life can really be a turkey sometimes, can’t it?
The YouTube Millionaires
- Jeffree Star: $50 million
- Daniel Middleton: $45 million
- Colleen Ballinger: $30 million
- Felix Kjellberg: $20 million
- Jake Paul: $19 million
- Logan Paul: $19 million
- Sean McLoughlin: $16 million
- Lilly Singh: $14 million
This is how Jeffree Star earns his YouTube money, which has made me realise that I need to up the ante a tad on my channel, or just get myself a rich sugar daddy/mummy. What do you think?
eSports Millionaires
It’s reported that the eSports industry will be worth around $2 billion by 2020 and these players are currently earning millions by playing video games competitively:
- Amer Al-Barkawi
- Ivan Ivanov
- Lasse Urpalainen
- Jesse Vainikka
- Sumail Hassan
- Maroun Merhej
- Saahil Arora
- Peter Dager
Each of these players has earned anything from $1.5 to $3.5 million in the last couple of years with one or two of them only having taken up gaming fairly recently.
The 2014 League of Legends World Final in Seoul, South Korea, for instance, was watched by 27 million people online and broadcast on over 40 TV channels. In 2017, meanwhile, eSports earnings for the year’s five major game titles amounted to $78.1 million (£59.63 million)– a staggering amount for what was until recently a niche market.
Love or loathe video gaming, or indeed the content of the top YouTubers, they’re here to stay and clearly deliver content that millions of spectators love to watch.
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Hi Marc,
The high standards of human beings in life and living is disappearing down the same chute as body waste.
What happened to hard work, high levels of being a moral person with good manners, consideration of others, doing a job of work to benefit self-esteem, use the money earned to keep other people in work, food, clothing, car, house and many other things to keep the world of manufacturing and production moving forward which benefits thousands/millions/billions of other people and families.
Gaming for obscene amounts of money, 100% selfish, non-productive, non beneficial to society, family, or friends, requiring little or no range of intelligence, common sense or a varied lifestyle which lacks interaction with other human beings.
Welcome to a world housing gaming zombies who lack any self-control within themselves or life in world of reality, weather changes, situation changes, news and events around the normal humans’ world outsde the front door.
Monkeys cannot be taught to live like human beings but they can be taught to push buttons in order to create a reaction.
Gamers are mere monkeys reacting to the will of video game producers and falling into the trap of the greatest bait of all time … money … the benefit of which is useless to a monkey.
I understand your point of view Jon, but I wouldn’t go as far as describing pro gamers as simian.
As a gamer myself, I’d be quite happy if I earned a few bucks from my gaming videos on my YouTube channel. After all, if companies are prepared to pay people for their content and effort, it’s hard to sniff at that.
Okay, it doesn’t offer much to building a better world, but in the end, it’s simply entertainment.