Once a YouTube video is monetized, as long as the players can woo eyeballs to their channels, they receive a reliable income stream—unless the video gets slapped with a copyright claim. In most cases Let’s Players don’t own the copyright to the games they record and profit from. Whether or not this is legal remains unclear.

Let’s Play videos exist in a gray area of the law. On the one hand, players appropriate footage—sometimes wholesale—from copyrighted video games and run ads on them. Game developers argue that this amounts to intellectual property theft, and is illegal without a license from the games’ publishers. On the other had, a Let’s Play video isn’t simply a recording of a game; the player adds his narration and changes the experience for viewers. In legal language this is called “transformative fair use,” and players believe that because they repurpose an original work, they should be allowed to continue. Let’s Plays also provide free advertising for the games developers wish to sell.

Since game developers and Let’s Players have never gone to court, there’s no precedent to shed light on the legality of Let’s Plays. Greg Lastowka, who teaches Internet and property law at the Rutgers School of Law-Camden, finds the players’ transformative fair use argument a solid one. He predicts that as Let’s Players gain economic power, they may start challenging developers in court. Or developers may start to bring Let’s Players into the fold, offering them licenses to make Let’s Plays while taking a cut of ad revenue.

“We’re going to have these authorized amateur creators that are out there, and then we’re going to have other people not realizing you need a license,” Lastowka said. “As the market matures there’s going to be a need to really clear up what the lines are.”

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When they’re not at conventions like PAX, Let’s Players stay in touch online, Skyping and Tweeting, drawn together by how much they love gaming.

For players like Varrone, online activities have become a full-time job. He spends up to 30 hours every week playing games and recording, editing and rendering video on YouTube. He records his videos out of his makeshift recording studio—his bedroom in Connecticut—where he placed a red light outside his door that he switches on whenever he’s recording to alert his parents and sister not to bug him.

He records long Let’s Plays in bits and pieces; a game that might take 40 hours to complete gets chopped into 60 episodes, each 20 minutes long, that he uploads one by one in a playlist. He meticulously edits each video to eliminate mistakes or awkward pauses in his commentary. A 20-minute episode might take five hours to record and edit.

When Varrone started Let’s Playing in 2011, quite a few real-world friends thought he was wasting his time on a dumb activity. Now that he gets a paycheck every month, they’ve changed their tune.