With the industry booming and set to keep rising, Esports has become an extremely viable way to make money. Whereas just 10 years ago getting paid to play your favourite games was pretty much a pipe dream, there are now players signing multi million contracts with streaming services or winning tournaments with prize pools upto $25 million.
Whilst there are plenty of avenues not discussed in this article about how to make money from Esports – including things like esports betting, a new facet of the online gambling landscape- where you can make money from your knowledge of the game without having to actually play the game – this article will cover what to do if you’ve got mad skills at your favourite game!
Earnings as a top Player
With Esports not just being profitable as an industry on the whole, even individual players can earn some crazy figures. An astounding number of the top players have earned over $5 million for their skills, with these figures only expected to rise in the future.
So how do these players actually earn this money – and how can you get a piece of the pie?
Methods to earn
You don’t actually have to be one of the top players to earn money through Esports. Whilst there are top players in most competitive games such as CSGO and League of Legends who get invited to huge tournaments to win millions, this is just one path to monetising your skills.
For both people who play professionally and streamers, a majority of their income actually comes from sponsorship. This comes from companies wanting the streamers and teams to promote or sell their products – there’s sponsors in plenty of niches, including mobile and PC games, software, energy drinks and gamer chairs to male grooming and even mystery boxes.
There’s also smaller, local tournaments if you don’t quite fancy the big leagues. The big tournaments often require lots of knockout rounds, travel and hours upon hours of intense practice, whereas the smaller tournaments don’t have as much pressure. Whilst the prize pool obviously won’t be as much, it’s a great way to earn some extra money, have fun and get better in the process.
There’s also the route of creating content around a certain game or even genre of games. Whether your specialty is MMO’s, first person shooters or racing games, you can create a Youtube channel around it and grow an audience. Whilst the payoffs here aren’t immediate, if you build up a large enough following you can earn a living purely off of your videos. There’s also a whole range of content types you can create – from humorous videos to how to guides to showcases of crazy skill.
Streaming is an extremely viable option as well for gamers, with Twitch being the number 1 streaming platform out there, but there’s also plenty of other platforms that you could use. You can get paid through the sponsorships we mentioned earlier, or through donations and memberships to your channel. Some streamers also use a service known as DTTS, or donate text to speech, where viewers and fans can donate to send you a message which then gets read out live on the stream.
Finally, there’s helping other players rank up. This is an extremely overlooked method at making money with your Esports skills and mainly found in the more competitive games such as CS:GO, Dota 2 and Rainbow Six Siege. You simply help a lower ranked player rank up by helping them, which could mean playing on their team and carrying them or just simply observing them play and pointing out where they’re going wrong.
Whilst this method won’t earn you the millions that competing in big tournaments or becoming the number one streamer on a game will, it allows you to earn some extra cash for just helping someone out for a couple of hours as opposed to the hours, days or even months of practice you’d have to do with some of the other methods on this list.
