The most followed players on the platform Twitch earn well into seven figures. Illustration by Andy Rementer Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

One humid morning this past summer, Omeed Dariani drove his black Tesla sedan through the foothills east of San Diego, looking apprehensive. Dariani is the founder and C.E.O. of Online Performers Group, a talent-management company dedicated to professional video-game streamers, who broadcast their game play and commentary live over the Internet. He is thirty-eight, with a dry, ironic wit and a nervous habit of twirling his goatee, which is rapidly going gray; his clients are, for the most part, young, boisterous, and unpredictable. That day, he was on his way to meet the streamer Roberto Garcia, who was supposed to be at home but had instead gone to a casino outside the city to celebrate his girlfriend’s birthday. Dariani’s speedometer crept toward ninety miles per hour. “We just need to get there before he starts to drink,” he said.

Garcia, known online as Towelliee, is a star broadcaster on Twitch, a streaming platform whose popularity has turned recreational gaming into an improbably viable career. Each month, a hundred million visitors watch their favorite personalities play video games on Twitch, spending an average of nearly two hours a day there. This audience is large enough to make the site one of the twenty most trafficked in the U.S., yet it’s perhaps more apt to measure Twitch against a different medium. With viewership numbers that rival those of MSNBC or CNN, Twitch is less like a conventional Web site than like a kaleidoscopic television network: thousands of channels at once, broadcasting live at every hour of the day.

Shortly before noon, Dariani pulled up in front of the Viejas Casino & Resort and handed his keys to a valet. He strode inside, eyes scanning the acres of slot machines. Though Dariani is chummy and non-judgmental with clients, he’s seen enough drunk streamers fall off balconies at industry parties to inspire an almost parental anxiety. He glanced at his phone, and then showed me an eclectically punctuated text from Garcia. “That’s probably not a good sign of sobriety,” he said. Yet when Garcia appeared—bearded, stout, and wearing aviator sunglasses—he was convivial but composed. “I just watched my girlfriend lose nine hundred dollars in about three minutes,” he announced cheerfully.

Garcia led us up to the casino’s Presidential Suite, where his girlfriend, Aracely, was waiting at the bar. When Garcia started streaming, in 2010, he’d recently been laid off from a quality-assurance job at a pharmaceutical-software company; he and Aracely scraped by on unemployment checks and her wages from Costco. Game broadcasting was new, and the business model all but nonexistent. Still, Garcia thought that he could make it work, so he sat Aracely down to convince her. “Imagine telling your girlfriend, ‘I’m going to stop looking for a job and play video games for a living,’ ” he told me. Aracely, sitting beside him, nodded. “It was a hard conversation,” she said.

Game streaming, Garcia discovered, required non-stop work. The only way to attract viewers, and to prevent the ones you had from straying to other broadcasters, was to be online constantly, so he routinely streamed for eighteen hours a day. “That’s what I had to do to grow the viewership,” he said. His ankles swelled from sitting at his computer. His weight grew to four hundred and twenty pounds.

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. (“I was so bad, I got kicked out of the dare program,” he told me.) After a year of broadcasting, he had a steady audience of seven hundred, but he was still desperately broke. During a stream, he asked viewers to help him hang on a little longer. One sent him fifteen hundred dollars—a gift that reduced Garcia to tears. “I had to shut my mike off and walk away,” he said. “Everyone was, like, ‘Where’d he go? Is he dead from the donation?’ ”

Six years later, Garcia makes several times that amount on a good day. Since 2011, he has been one of Twitch’s “partners,” an élite group that includes some twenty-five thousand streamers, of the 2.2 million active on the site. Between his thousands of subscribers—who pay a monthly fee for access to perks such as ad-free viewing—and his sponsorships, appearance fees, and tips, he earns a “low- to mid-six-figure” income. His streaming schedule has become more manageable, though it remains arduous: sixty hours a week, no days off except occasional Saturdays. He has devoted nearly thirty thousand hours to World of Warcraft. “I’m a grinder, man,” he told me.

To sponsors, Twitch offers a novel opportunity: access to a generation that resists traditional advertising media but is steeped in video games. Young people watch game streaming in huge numbers (Twitch claims to reach half of the millennial males in the United States) and often in prodigious quantities. “This year, Towelliee’s viewers have watched five hundred and ninety-four years of his content,” Dariani said. In 2016, Garcia sold nearly three million dollars’ worth of his sponsors’ products through links on his Twitch channel.

For all the traffic and revenue that Twitch generates, the game-streaming market remains a free-for-all, its driven, rambunctious broadcasters struggling to manage their newfound success. Dariani aims to become streaming’s William Morris—a pioneering talent manager who leads a new class of entertainer into professionalism. Already, his best-paid clients can earn two million dollars a year; some command twenty thousand dollars to play a studio’s game for a single three-hour stream. Executives both covet and fear Twitch broadcasters’ influence. “This eighteen-year-old punk kid shows up,” Dariani told me, describing a typical meeting with potential sponsors, “and he’s talking about how things are ‘retarded’ and making fart jokes and not listening to your team with a hundred years of experience. And you’re sitting there going, ‘This is the guy who makes the decision about whether my company succeeds or fails?’ ” Dariani smiled. “First you’re angry. But then you’re terrified.”

Online Performers Group’s office sits on the top floor of a putty-gray building in San Diego’s Point Loma neighborhood, less than a mile from the airport; the roar of plane traffic frequently interrupts conversation. “We call it the Point Loma pause,” Dariani said. “It gives you time to reflect.” One recent afternoon, Oliver Pascual, an account manager, stood at his desk watching a client’s stream of a game called Farming Simulator 17. Onscreen, a grimy blue tractor hauled a trailer through an autumnal pasture. “People like watching him farm stuff,” Pascual explained, shrugging. “He’s literally looking for a place to dump grass right now.”

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Nearby, a whiteboard listed dozens of pending deals, including projects with Intel and Logitech. On the opposite wall, a huge television showed a client called ProfessorBroman broadcasting the sci-fi blockbuster Destiny 2 for an audience of six thousand. (A few days later, another client, KingGothalion, would play Destiny 2 in a marathon stream that attracted more than half a million viewers.) Meanwhile, on a love seat in the waiting area, the streamer Cinthya Alicea, who broadcasts as CinCinBear, toyed idly with her blue hair extensions as she chatted with employees about an upcoming cruise to Mexico to which O.P.G. was treating its clients and staff.