For five years, Alex Ridley honed his body and mind as a professional athlete playing football for WAFL club East Perth.

Now the 23-year-old's athletic pursuits are focused on an even bigger prize — but the 50 hours a week he spends training are done within the four walls of his study, from the click wheel of a mouse.

Ridley's new game is Hearthstone, an online collectible card game from Blizzard Entertainment, the gaming giant who created World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Overwatch.

In 2016, the Perth-based esports competitor broke onto the international scene, placing fourth in Hearthstone's Asia-Pacific Winter Championship and ultimately finding himself among the top players in the world.

Ridley is making an international name for himself under the online alias NaviOOT. ( Supplied: Alex Ridley )

He walked away with $10,000 in prize money and a sense of justification in his decision to stop his business degree at the University of Western Australia.

"I was attending uni and trying to do streaming at the same time, and a couple of examination periods later it was pretty obvious that it had to be one or the other," he said.

"I kept telling myself that picking university was the smart thing to do but my heart was always in the streaming."

Ridley spent five years at WAFL club East Perth before giving up university for esports. ( Supplied: Alex Ridley )

Ridley, like many esports athletes, spends much of his time streaming on Twitch, a subscription-based online platform.

"Viewers can watch for free, but if they're really enjoying the content they can subscribe to your channel and that will give you a bit of revenue each month, and in return they get some benefits like chat and whatnot," he said.

"Twitch is American so there's also a really strong tipping kind of culture, so you can earn revenue through donations and ads as well."

Dream job not all fun and games

Ridley, whose online handle NaviOOT pays homage to his favourite childhood game Ocarina of Time, pulls in around $8,000 per month — mostly from streaming on Twitch and with a small amount coming from a team contract.

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While that is a relatively high wage for a 23-year-old, the lifestyle is not without its pitfalls.

"On the one hand I get to play video games for a living, travel and hang out with friends online everyday," he said.

"But on the other hand, it's extremely high stress, competitive, hard to start out, carries a bit of a stigma and can be a kind of lonely profession."

Even his family took some time to come to terms with his career choice, but Ridley points to a piece of advice his police officer father gave him years ago.

Esports may have been more lucrative for Ridley than football, but it hasn't been easy. ( Supplied: Alex Ridley )

"My dad always used to tell me that if you could find something you love, you'd never work a day in your life, and that's kind of always stuck with me," he said.

"My family was pretty against it in the beginning, but I've been putting a lot of work in since then, and they've definitely come around to it and support me now.

"I'm very lucky for that."

Australians playing catch-up

Ridley is among a growing number of young Australians working to make a name for themselves on the world stage, with a recent win in Singapore at one of the Hearthstone Championship Tour events a good sign for his future.

Training to play Hearthstone, a collectible card game, takes up 50 hours of Ridley's week. ( ABC News: Hugh Sando )

By 2020, the global esports market is expected to be worth more than $1.9 billion.

Future technology, science and culture expert Seamus Byrne said while the local market was considered a few years behind, it was starting to catch up.

"[It is] definitely a combination of Australia being a much smaller market than a lot of other overseas markets, and then that that classic bugbear of the NBN having been a very slow rollout of catching us up to the high speeds of internet elsewhere," he said.

"But we are seeing more serious investment coming into this local environment.

"Sponsors are coming on board, a lot of those sorts of elements that start to mean that players can get treated more seriously and … travel internationally more often, and really compete on that international level."

Predictions now have the global industry pulling an estimated audience of around 600 million fans by 2020.

'It can go south very quickly'

More than two-thirds of that audience will be aged between 13 and 40, and while that is considered one of the hardest demographics to attract, with youth also comes the unknown.

The growth in competitive gaming has seen esports leagues pack out venues from Sydney to Singapore. ( Supplied )

"It's true that esports fans are both incredibly passionate but also very cynical," Mr Byrne said.

"And so we do sometimes see a situation where if someone takes a sponsorship that their fans don't agree with, that can mean they'll get a backlash right through to fans pulling away their subscription support."

Loss of subscriptions means loss of income, and it can happen overnight.

"The job is super high stress in the sense that you can become irrelevant really, really quickly," Ridley said.

"I think about footballers, you know, when they get to 30 they kind of fall off a cliff real fast.

"It's a bit similar to streaming in that sense, if you have a couple of bad months or a couple of bad streams, it can go south very quickly."

From real life to all walks of life

Knowing his time on the competitive circuit has an expiration date, Ridley aspires to design games in the future.

Ridley says live streaming video games draws together people from across the world. ( ABC News: Hugh Sando )

However, for now, he is doing his best to balance the demands of the competitive circuit with his need to stream for revenue, all the while working to maintain a social life.

"I make a pretty strong effort to try maintain some real-life relationships," he said.

"I was maybe a bit lax on it a couple of years ago, but I've definitely knuckled down on that and yeah, they're pretty strong still.

"But one of the magical things about Twitch for me is definitely that it can bring people from all walks of life, all over the world together in one online chat room.

"You're all drawn together by the common interest, whether it's the game or the streamer, and just seeing people bounce off each other and find common ground, it's pretty special."