Making Money Playing Video Games

Mom Lied, Playing Video Games Can Pay The Bills

League of Legends: Mid-Season Invitational 2017, where teams compete for their share of a million dollar prize pool

For years as a child, I was told by my mother that playing video games would never get me anywhere in life. First it was a Gameboy Color running Pokemon Blue, which I would constantly be told to put away during meals or sneak to my room at night to play with the aid of a dollar-store flashlight. As the technology advanced, so did my interest in games and the time I could pour into them. Gameboys gave way to GPUs, Staryu became Starcraft, and my love for the esports scene exploded just as high school began. The more I loved video games, the more my mother hated them. Whatever precious time I spent not playing Skyrim and Portal 2 was devoted to watching Tasteless and Artosis scream at banelings, and my grades certainly showed it. My mother never believed these esport athletes were able to win hundreds of thousands of dollars “just playing video games.”

Flash forward to 2017 and my mother should be eating her words. Last year’s largest esports tournament—DOTA 2’s ‘The International’—saw 80 players splitting an almost $21 million dollar prize pool. The average player took home north of a half million dollars, just by “playing video games” for five days. Streaming sites like Twitch and Youtube Live allow even gamers with modest followings, as few as 50 followers on Twitch, to monetize gaming content. Top streamers on the site earn thousands of dollars every time they go online through ads, donations, subscriptions, and partnerships. Like my mother predicted, I am not one of these people.

What still gives my non-existent esports career hope, however, is the growing market for playing games of skill for real money in much smaller settings than world championships. This past weekend I entered an esports contest from my phone in a game called Missile Dodge. The game is far more simple than League of Legends or CS:GO—you build a high score steering a plane away from oncoming missiles. The app, put out by a company called Jackpot Rising, charged me 50¢ an attempt to try and make it on the leaderboard for a share of the prize.

For the minute and a half my plane fled the missiles, I was no longer a kid with his phone on the couch. The couch had become Madison Square Garden, and I was esports hottest new star. I was Faker, Fallen, or BoxeR. A lifetime dream of turning my skills into cold, hard cash had come true.

At the end of the weekend I had big news for Mom. I had brought home $4.75 off my half-dollar investment. It wasn’t an amount of money you would normally call home over, but it represented something bigger. Years of conventional wisdom and motherly lectures had just been blown to smithereens much like my airplane when the heat-seeking missile landed. I was not as fortunate as the contest’s first place winner, whose high score brought home almost $50 of the $237.61, but who knows, there’s always next week.