What Careers Do Gamers Have Available to Them?

If a time traveller were to tell someone from the 90s that it would soon be possible for people to earn a living from gaming, chances are that they would be dismissed straight away. This notion mirrors the attitude at the time when the video game industry was still in its early stages. The public saw video games as unproductive, especially when it came to children playing them. Any child who fantasised about playing games for a job would have been told to stop dreaming. Despite this, today, those dreams have become a reality, and it is now easier than ever to get a career in gaming.

There are several reasons why this is now possible to do. One could be that the gaming industry has experienced a meteoric rise since the turn of the century, creating more of a demand for everything to do with gaming. Also, there have been a few platforms that have grown in popularity, namely YouTube and Twitch, which make it possible for people to show their content to an audience. Most will agree that the two main ways into gaming for money are either streaming or content creation, though there is also the competitive gaming route. Despite this, competitive gaming is reserved for the players who are simply the best in the world, meaning that it is not nearly as accessible compared to the other aforementioned paths.

No doubt, creating and posting content represents the oldest way to be able to make money by playing video games. Before the popular video sharing site YouTube came out, there wasn’t a central place where gamers could upload their clips online and hope to grow an audience. YouTube soon became the main site for uploading videos though, so the smartest gamers utilised the platform and began to make money from it by uploading content. This was done through various sponsorships by brands and through the Partner Programme. People eventually saw that it is possible to become insanely rich from doing YouTube, one only must look to PewDiePie for an extreme example of a YouTuber earning tens of millions a year.

Twitch presented gamers with another way that they could make money by playing video games. This is because Twitch was touted as a rival to YouTube, which some people were becoming increasingly disillusioned with due to several issues on the platform. Instead of focusing on video sharing, Twitch opted to focus on streaming, which is playing video games live in front of an audience. Many people preferred this path to a career in gaming as it was easier to get established and proved to be more interactive when compared to YouTube, which is dominated by larger channels and can be a lonely experience.

Twitch also welcomes many different niches, for example, many slot streamers get paid to showcase the latest slot games. Those who are after a similar experience can find a good example here, but it will come as no surprise that there are thousands of great gambling sites online.

Both options provide a great way to earn money for playing video games and are both lucrative options. They appear to also be stable jobs, as people involved in this line of work were able to play through the pandemic unimpeded. Ultimately, content creation or streaming are both accessible, profitable paths to playing games for money.