I wish I would of thought of twitch TV. Who would of thought watching others play videogames would be so exciting for many?
Twitch is crazy. I know a guy who makes $100s of dolllars streaming every night. The other Night he made over $600 after just 2 hours. Get a fanbase and they start donating. Twitch also gives you revenue if you put advertisements to.
And what a lot of older folk dont know is that these pro players get treated like celebrities. Everything in their life gets reported, everything they do is written about, its crazy.
Man maybe I need to do Twitch, and my asian friends play LoL...I never got into it, but I hear its great. That is insane
I've been watching twitch streams for a bit now and got more into professional DOTA over LoL but it's definitely a huge market. I jumped on Twitch right now and the top 5 games and viewership looks like this: 1. DOTA 2 - 170K 2. LoL - 123K 3. WoW - 59K 4. Hearthstone - 33K 5. GTA V - 30K That is currently about 415,000 people watching just 5 games. There's a reason that twitch sold for almost a billion dollars a few months ago.
I watch Call of Duty streams mostly. The correct term for this whole video game movement is "esports". These players are getting sponsored now by legit companies, RedBull, Mountain Dew, etc. Its powerful and call me nuts, call me crazy, but I could see Esports getting coverage on your Sports networks like ESPN. Heck ESPN airs the tournaments now to on their website so its only a matter of time it pops up on Sportcenter.
Theres a twitch channel call STREAMERHOUSETV. Its a bunch of dudes who bought a house , play and stream gaming literally all day for 365+ days. They recently made it on national news and seem to be making good money. Its mainly 3 dudes who do 8 hr shifts and they sometimes invite viewers to their house. Pretty cool concept but I wonder how long it will last. The host tend to be assholes and encourage the chat to "misbehave" but overall neat idea.
there's actually a doc. on these people and how serious they take gaming, lol. Dudes leaving their mothers, hugging them as they make their journey to a tournament miles away. Havent watched but its free on YT/STEAM.
Dunno if it was the same one but I saw a doc on this stuff. Pretty interesting and kinda sad/weird in my opinion. They did a segment of it on a college that now has scholarship "athletes" for a league of legends team.
Yeah professional CoD teams now live together to. Cod teams consist of 4 players but this is what they do 12 hours a day: and these are their jerseys which they are making a fortune off of: Between sponsorship, apparel sale, tournament winnings, livestreams, they are raking in more cash than most your bosses are making.....
The best player in the world of League of Legends quit professional gaming and is now doing streaming of his personal gaming or something for $800k a year
eSports has definitely grown a lot in the last few years between Twitch and the tournament payouts, like I said I watch DOTA mostly so I don't know about other games (I assume LoL has some big payouts) but for The International this year the winning team of 5 players won over $5mil and the total tournament payout was over $11mil. That's just for one tournament. Even outside of eSports/MLG and Twitch streams you have YouTube stars making big money, Pewdiepie is the most subscribed to channel on all of YouTube and I read an article saying he makes over 4mil UK pounds per year (which I think he denied and the math in the article was a little wonky but he's probably still making 7 figures just not starting with a 3 or 4). Plus you have guys like markiplier, captain sparklez, jacksepticeye, etc. Basically they do the same thing as a Twitch stream (some do both) but they just edit the video so it's more concise and it's a 10min video and not just 8 hours of a guy randomly playing a game which may have a lot of lulls in it.
esports... I hate that term. Nothing against this shit, make your money booboo, but it's professional video gaming not sports.
I would say it's as much a sport as bowling. Recreationally considered a game but professionally considered a sport.
Good comparison. There's zero physical activity in this though. Sport by definition necessitates a physical exertion.