How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online

[Sunlei]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/how-to-get-rich-playing-video-games-online

One humid morning this past summer, Omeed Dariani drove his black Tesla sedan through the foothills east of San Diego, looking apprehensive. Dariani is the founder and C.E.O. of Online Performers Group, a talent-management company dedicated to professional video-game streamers, who broadcast their game play and commentary live over the Internet. He is thirty-eight, with a dry, ironic wit and a nervous habit of twirling his goatee, which is rapidly going gray; his clients are, for the most part, young, boisterous, and unpredictable. That day, he was on his way to meet the streamer Roberto Garcia, who was supposed to be at home but had instead gone to a casino outside the city to celebrate his girlfriend’s birthday. Dariani’s speedometer crept toward ninety miles per hour. “We just need to get there before he starts to drink,” he said.

To sponsors, Twitch offers a novel opportunity: access to a generation that resists traditional advertising media but is steeped in video games. Young people watch game streaming in huge numbers (Twitch claims to reach half of the millennial males in the United States) and often in prodigious quantities. “This year, Towelliee’s viewers have watched five hundred and ninety-four years of his content,” Dariani said. In 2016, Garcia sold nearly three million dollars’ worth of his sponsors’ products through links on his Twitch channel.

But Twitch resisted easy figuring out. The service began less as a commercial venture than as a piece of performance art. In 2007, a group of recent Yale graduates concocted the idea of broadcasting every moment of the co-founder Justin Kan’s life, through a Web site that they called Justin.tv. For nine months, from a camera attached to his hat, Kan beamed out live video of everything he did (except for bodily necessities), using a streaming tool that the group had developed. The stunt eventually wore thin, but viewers kept asking for a way to live-stream their own exploits. To the founders’ surprise, what users wanted most was to broadcast themselves playing video games. “It became the tail that wagged the dog,” Emmett Shear, a co-founder and Twitch’s current C.E.O., later told the Times. “It ended up taking over our whole company.” In 2014, Amazon acquired the service, which had been renamed Twitch, for nine hundred and seventy million dollars. It now has more than twelve hundred employees.

In the next few years, Dariani expects, the annual marketing expenditure on Twitch streamers will surpass a billion dollars. By his rough estimate, two thousand broadcasters are already making a middle-class income through Twitch; he has seen clients turn down fifty thousand dollars for a two-hour convention appearance because they didn’t want to deal with the travel. “The amount of money in content creation is ludicrous,” David Martinez, an acquaintance of Dariani’s who manages the streamer and YouTuber Ryan “Northernlion” Letourneau, told me. “It’s one thing to make a living playing video games. It’s another thing to be people like us who make a living off those people, and live comfortably. It’s fucking crazy.”....continued at New Yorker link at top.

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[Gothmog]

1. They are forming leagues for professional esports teams

Blizzard has formed an Overwatch league and Riot games is forming a League of Legends league