Career Choices

Growing up as kids we all have similar dreams of becoming a doctor or lawyer, and not just for the societal respect these jobs entail, but for the giant pay checks they receive every week. It‘s the dream, working the classic nine to five job, and bringing home a six digit salary, but what does one have to do to achieve this? The answer is school, hard work and sacrifice.

Grinding half-a-dozen years of college to finally get your shot at the dream isn’t so appealing to some. The time required to work in one these respected careers is demotivating to most, but that doesn’t mean you can’t earn a six digit salary. Copious amounts of money can be attained in any career path, and no exception is video-gaming.

Growing in popularity, video-gaming is a fast growing industry, attracting more and more people every year. Who would have ever thought that playing a game could earn you so much money, and make you a cyber-based celebrity?

15 Minutes of Fame

Video games are entertaining, and people not only love to play them, but today people love to watch them! Online streaming sites such as Twitch TV and Azubu allow people to watch live broadcasts of people playing video games. Entertainment for some, live streaming is actually a full time job for others, earning ridiculous amount of cash at the end of the day.

Doctors are famous for not only their ability to save lives, but their pay checks, and it requires close to a decade of hard work and sacrifices in order reach this position. So why go through so much work when you could earn three times the amount just by playing a video-game and live stream yourself?

Do the Math!

TimTheTatMan, a semi-professional Counter-Strike Global Offence (CSGO) player live streams his game play on a regular schedule. Using Twitch TV, Tim averages about 5000 live viewers and peaking at about 10,000. The questions are raised, how does he make money? And how does he earn three times the amount of a doctor? Well, I’m going to show you.

Streamers of a high caliber, such as Tim, have four main sources of income: Partnership, donations, ad revenue and lastly sponsors. Twitch TV offers highly viewed streamers partnerships, in which loyal viewers have the option to pay $5.00 per month for a subscription.

They gain special interactions on the stream, such as unique emoticons and trigger on stream effects.The streamer earns $2.50 of the viewers paid money, and Twitch TV takes the rest. Tim publicly releases how many active subscribers he has, and the last released figure was 7,800. Let’s do some math here –

Number of subscribers times money earned per subscriber

7800 x 2.5

= $19,500 (monthly)

One months’ worth of subscriber payments is $19,500, and annually that’s $234,000. Now time to calculate Ad Revenue. Twitch TV pays $2.00 for every 1000 viewers of an ad. Tim, on average, plays one series ads per hour and streams for roughly 40 hours a week with a viewer base of 5,000 people. So let’s see –

$2.00 for every 1000 views with 5000 viewers 40 hours a week

= $400 per week in ad revenue on Tim’s schedule

So roughly $1,600 a month, and $19,200 annually

Now let’s do the donations. On average donations are more common than a subscriptions, and unlike subscriptions, Tim receives the full amount and isn’t docked any from Twitch TV. Donations are often between $3.00 and often in the hundreds, depending how generous viewers are feeling.

For clarification and the possibility of over estimating revenue from donations, calculations will be made with the assumption they are as common as a subscriptions and counter at $3.00 each (minimum value).

So same as above –

7,800 x 3.00

= $23,400 (monthly) and $280,800 (annually)

Now finally, sponsors. Although gaming sponsors avoid handing over cash just to flop their logo on something, they often hand out freebies, such as headsets and keyboard, but in Tim’s case, his entire computer setup has been supplied to him.

So how much is all of this together?

$234,000 (subs) + $19,200 (Ads) + $280,800 (donations) + Computer and equipment (sponsors)

Coming in at roughly a whopping $534,000 (plus a cheeky computer set up), Tim is one rich guy.

Professional Gamer!

It’s true, why go to a university, when you could sit on your ass all day playing a popular game you’re semi-decent at. Spend six months of your life working on your charisma, another three months getting some-what decent at a game, find a reliable internet source and there you have it, the start of your gaming career. With the gaming industry growing bigger and bigger, now is the perfect time to invest in it.

Being a doctor, lawyer, or even an astronaut doesn’t sound so appealing now, does it? You don’t need to play modern games, just blow the dust off your old Nintendo 64, screen it online and get that nostalgic feeling flowing through viewers. What are you going to do?