For as long as there have been video games, people have dreamed of making a living by playing them. As Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms developed monetization schemes, the dream has become achievable for more and more people. Of course, it isn’t that simple — it’s immensely difficult to make money gaming.
Competition is fierce, gaming is something a lot of people want to do. Still, if you’re interested in trying to make some money through gaming, here are the best ways to pull it off.
How to Make Money Gaming
Make Money Gaming By Streaming Games on Twitch (Expert Level Hard)
When most people think about making money by playing games, they’re thinking about playing games for an audience on Twitch.
On Twitch, gaming streamers primarily make money through subscriptions purchased by viewers to support the channel, earn subscriber privileges, and skip the platform’s ads. Thus, gamers looking to make an income on Twitch have to cultivate relationships with their chat audience through humor, relatability, high-level skill, or some other quality that helps them stand out from the thousands of other streamers like them.
There’s plenty of advice for getting started on Twitch out there, but here’s a basic step-by-step guide:
Step 1) Pick a Name for Your Channel and Set up Some Basic Branding and Stream Assets
You don’t have to get fancy here — you can use OBS Studio and free Streamelements overlays.
Step 2) Pick Games That You Already Like or That You Think You Might.
Your audience likely won’t have fun if you aren’t enjoying yourself. Would you watch someone grind away joylessly for hours? Look at the top charts on Twitch. You’ll find people who bring in audiences by being fun to watch. Part of being fun is having fun.
Step 3) Try To Play Games That Aren’t Currently Huge on Twitch
While you might think it makes sense to play something popular, playing a slightly older or less-widely played title will make it more likely that fans of that game will find your stream. There may be an audience waiting for someone to play vintage Worms
Step 4) Engage with chat using Twitch tools like polls and stick to a schedule you can reasonably manage.
Use Twitches tools to interact with your viewers. Run polls. Welcome new followers! Don’t badger your chat to subscribe or donate to your channel. Viewers don’t like to feel like they’re being begged for money.
Focus on being consistent in your streaming schedule and engaging your viewers. Being both fun and reliable can build your audience.
The goal for professional Twitch streamers is to hit Partner status, which unlocks special privileges with the platform and guarantees better revenue share from ads, subscriptions, and other income sources.
That said, hitting Partner can be quite difficult, and you can make money on Twitch at the affiliate level as well, which is much easier to achieve.
It’s hard to find numbers for how much Twitch streamers make since there’s so much variance, but you can do some basic math by calculating how much money you receive from each subscription. If you want to make anything more than spare change on Twitch, though, you’ll probably have to commit to streaming most days of the week for several hours at a time.
Monetizing Gaming Videos on YouTube (Hard)
If streaming isn’t for you, the other main route most people go to make money from gaming is YouTube. Some creators stream on the platform or use the membership feature to monetize their videos. However, the main method for making money on YouTube is still ads and YouTube Premium revenue share.
In order to earn ad revenue from YouTube, you need 1,000 subscribers and either 4,000 public watch hours in the last year or 10 million public Shorts views in the last 90 days.
That’s no easy task, and it requires a lot of investment up front with no guarantee that you’ll ever hit those numbers.
All kinds of gaming content do well on YouTube. There are plenty of long-form video essays about gaming. However, creators like Dunkey have found success making shorter, humorous videos about new releases.
Another approach is to recommend less well-known indie games, since there are far too many released each day for anyone to keep up with.
Probably the most straightforward way to start making videos on YouTube about gaming is to produce useful content like guides for a game you’re already familiar with, whether it’s build guides for MMOs, techniques for getting an edge in competitive shooters, or advice on how to defeat difficult bosses in single player games.
What Doesn’t Work on YouTube
About the only gaming content that as a rule doesn’t do well on YouTube is unedited stream footage. Most streamers who upload their Twitch streams to YouTube do so on a second channel and often edit the footage to just the highlights of a particular stream.
For the most part, monetizing gaming footage is ok on YouTube. However, some publishers have been hostile towards this practice in the past, making copyright claims on videos and preventing creators from earning money on them. Be sure to educate yourself on copyright to save yourself any future headaches.
Another Way to Make Money Playing Games: QA aka Quality Assurance Testing
Of course, long before Twitch and YouTube, gamers were turning their passion into a job by working in the field of quality assurance (QA). These jobs involve testing unreleased titles, searching for bugs and helping developers improve games before they’re published.
It isn’t quite as glamorous as streaming or making videos, and QA is much more than just “getting paid to play games,” but it’s another route to consider. You can search for QA jobs on game industry-specific career sites like Hitmarker.
Glassdoor says that the median salary for a QA position/games tester is $35,825, so it isn’t the most lucrative career. That said, gaining experience in a QA job may open up possibilities to move into other aspects of the game production process.
Can You Actually Make Money Gaming?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes, but…
Making a living through a hobby or interest may sound like a great idea, but there are a few things you should consider before you try to do it.
First, remember that many people have the same dream as you. When researchers ask American children what they want to be when they grow up, one of the most common responses is “YouTuber.”
There is already a glut of gaming content on YouTube, Twitch, and other platforms, and even though it might look easy, for every successful streamer or video creator there are thousands more whose content gets few or no views.
Of course, it’s always possible that you hit that magic combination of skill and luck and manage to start making money from gaming. But if playing games is how you relax, consider what it’ll be like when your hobby becomes your job.
It’s harder to enjoy something when you’re doing it for money, and “making money playing games” often involves a lot of stuff that isn’t actually playing things, like doing research, editing videos, and so on.
Still, new gaming channels pop off all the time — maybe yours will be next.
