Want to Become a Twitch Streamer?
The reality is often different from your expectations.
Ninja, aka Tyler Blevins, is a Twitch streamer. He’s not just any Twitch streamer… he’s an almost 10 million dollars per year streamer. After graduating from a Chicago high school, Ninja immediately became a professional gamer. By 2017, he had 500,000 followers. By February 2021, he reached $100,000 million status.
This is who my son wants to be.
My guess is, he’s not alone. About a billion parents out there trying to reason with their kids that being a professional gamer/streamer isn’t a great life plan.
Thing is — it is becoming increasingly difficult to make this argument. Parents can no longer say that playing a game professionally isn’t lucrative enough to pay the bills. There are professional gamers who can make around $1 million/year. Nick Sinclair at Careergamers.com writes:
Believe it or not, a career in esports can be quite lucrative. While older people do not consider it as a viable career, the current development in the industry proves otherwise. More and more people are entering the field every day, making the competition tough.
How much does a professional online gamer earn? The average professional gamer can earn $60,000 per year. If you are really good you can earn millions yearly including other perks like travel arrangements, sponsorships, and prizes.
Given that this is the information that is reaching gamers, it’s no wonder that they are considering professional gaming/twitch streaming as a career path. It’s a popular idea, it looks like fun, it’s creative and some professionals really earn a fantastic income. After doing some research, I am sure that it’s the perfect career for the right type of person.
I know little about the industry, but after reading and viewing the little that I have, it would seem that the ideal candidate for the career would be a combination of a camera-ready face, a mind-blowing big personality, and a skilled gamer. A lot of drive helps. It seems as if streaming requires someone who loves the limelight and will do pretty much anything to stay in the limelight.
I highly recommend this article from Consulting.com, where it listed possible ways to become a successful Twitch streamer:
Be an exceptionally good player at a game
Be a notably entertaining personality
Leverage a gimmick designed to create buzz (like talking about politics while playing a game or something else unique)
Forge unusually strong relationships with your viewers (knowing them by name, asking about their family, that kind of thing)
Teach your viewers how to play better and explain your decision-making process
The article goes into lots of detail about earning money through subscriptions, ad revenue, bit donations, sponsorships, and possible YouTube compensations. There’s information on affiliate marketing, and how to build up subscribers, and how to promote your business. In other words … it’s a regular business that succeeds through hard work and is not based purely on the ability to play a game well.
My concern as a parent is for any of the introverted people who are less resilient than most — who think this is a good career plan. Can you try to be a twitch streamer and not talk at all? I’ve read about introverts who began their streaming as a shy person, but who have developed over time and learned to be more outgoing. What if you aren’t a sales-type? I think that could be a detriment.
The Consulting.com article ended with this statement:
Only a small percentage of streamers make six figure plus incomes. The vast majority of even profitable streamers aren’t clearing anywhere close to that, and they have to essentially treat streaming like a full-time job without making a reasonable full time income.
That small percentage? According to Laura Chapman’s article in the Houston Chronicle:
There are perhaps 500 highly paid professional gamers worldwide. Approximately five positions are open to gamers from the United States.
Nick Galov states in “28 Streamline Switch Statistics of 2021”:
The average expert Twitch streamer makes between $3,000-$5,000 a month.
That income is nothing to sneeze at. The question needs to be asked, though — can you pay your rent, food, and tax bill based on this? Because yes, as a Twitch streamer, you need to pay taxes. Depending upon where you live, the answer could be yes. Depending on if you have no dependents, and/or you live with other people, then the answer could be yes. Let’s say you are frugal. The answer could be yes.
My next question is, will you be able to sustain subscribers as you age? I’m going to ask a somewhat facetious question, but it’s my impression that visuals are important in this world — at 20, you are quite nice-looking from a camera’s point of view.