I know there is youtube or creating letsplay videos, but lets be honest everyone does that and it dont pay the bills unless you meet requirements of the YouTube gods.
Im a casual gamer and im just wondering if i can turn this hobby into something like a job? Or should i prepare myself for a actually job in life?
So is it possible to earn real money as a gamer?
also im not sure where to put this sense there are not any money related communitys from what i know.
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streamers, make it to advertisements, promotions, brand deals, much like content creators, also they may not be true gamers, and only game as a way to get views.
If you want to make money in games, then start MAKING games. Learn python, C, or some Unreal engine. Playing games is just entertainment, like going to an art show.
You can try to stream, but you have to be funny, really amazing or female showing off your body. If you start to play around with making games and learning code. You can get a real job using it and make games on the side.
Game tester will kill your love for games. You get a small segment of a title and play it probably 5k times. Walking around, finding bugs, and recording what you found. It’s not “fun”.
Code. It’s the best option.
Work hard, learn to code, master the fundamentals, excel beyond your peers and you might have a real chance at… being laid off by embracer, microsoft or ubisoft. Sigh.
Sounds about right. 41% of game devs got laid off last year, and there have been several more big layoffs since that survey.
Statistically, this is a terrible time to try and join the industry.
In any entertainment business the top 1% takes home most of the money. The rest gets a few dollars here and there.
Most people are better off with a normal job and just do it for fun on evenings.
It is not easy, I’ve made little over $1k in about 6ish years of doing it as a hobby. It takes time, dedication, and an amount of knowledge about different systems. My advice, if you want to do, do it! But keep it as a hobby unless you get a winning ticket. Also important, don’t fake it (viewbots / chatbots) and dont steal it (art or assets). Making online media content is pretty fun and can help flex the creative muscles!
The reality is that they don’t. Only a small percentage of them gain a big enough following that they can get by with streaming payouts, donations, and sponsorships.
There’s so many people to watch and hardly anything unique about them to make them stand out.
Howdy.
I was paid to help people in games for a while.
In non online games I would win quite a lot at Warhammer/ Magic tournaments.
But none of these will entirely pay the bills.
You should prepare yourself to get a real job.
You can game on the side. You can even try to build up a following and turn that into something that replaces your job. But you probably won’t get that off the ground before needing a real job.
IMO gaming is in the same category with art, music, racing, football, photography etc—fun things to do, only very few can make a living out of them.
short response: you will take a real job
Don’t ruin a hobby with money. You will lose all enjoyment of it. Something changes when you get paid for it.
Myke Hurley said in some episode of Cortex podcast, that he doesn’t want to turn his new mechanical keyboard hobby into a jobby. He wants to keep some things as just hobbies. He has enough jobbies as it is, and he doesn’t want to ruin something he enjoys.
Although, it sounds more like OP has no jobs or jobbies, so having at least one should be ok.
It takes time to grow an audience, and if you’re very lucky maybe 5% of your audience will actually give you money to do what you do.
Even if you manage to stand out in what is a fairly saturated market, it will be years before you have enough people following you to make enough to live on. And to grow that audience you will have to put in constant steady effort all those years while seeing little to no return for it. If you waver, if you stop putting in that effort, the audience will start to go away and any momentum you had going will fade. And even if you do keep it up, there’s no guarantee that you will make a decent living from it.
It is not impossible, but keep in mind that turning it into a job will mean that it is a job. You will not spend most of your time playing video games and having fun. Most of it will be spent doing things to manage and grow the business - all of the technical details that go into setting up a quality stream, all of the social media aspects of interacting with your fans, all of the bureaucratic details that go into running any business.
Since*
I agree with the general trend of advice in this thread, but I’m going to go one step further: monetizing your hobbies is a very good way to get burnt out on those hobbies. Finding good work that you enjoy is important! But you should also have some things that are just for you.
They get a job.
you have to have a personality that people like, and thats the non negotiable part. the rest is work ethic. other than that, do not go into the field expecting to make money playing games, unless you live in a place with a low cost of living and you happen to collect bounties on difficult challenges which no one should be doing for a living.
