Remember when you first played a video game? You surely enjoyed it, even if your parents were terrified that it would become an addiction and your focus would switch from having a real career (like a doctor or engineer) to wasting your life. Surprisingly, the gaming industry has taken such a turn that now, you can financially sustain yourself from playing, and if you’re lucky enough and a great player, you can get rich by the age of 25. It sounds good, but is it a reliable choice for the future? Keep reading and find out.
A short introduction to gaming
Games have been a part of human history from the beginning. It started from rolling the dice, then we got arcade consoles, and finally, we got to experience games in Virtual Reality (VR). Although gaming was considered at some point harmful for kids and adults ― continuous playing on the computer was considered to be linked with unhealthy lifestyles and health issues (migraines, backaches and vision issues). Besides that, parents weren’t impressed with gaming technologies, and if you’d tell someone from the past ten years that gaming will become a career, they would probably laugh at you. But now, gaming tournaments are organized yearly, and they value millions of dollars.
The working environment
As gaming evolved more and more, developers had more tasks to fulfill in their jobs. The more responsibilities they had, the more the risks of burnout increased. As a result, the working environment became more stressful, leading to anxiety, chronic fatigue and even more severe health problems. Working in a gaming studio can be risky, especially with loud noises and all the hustle. Therefore, if your job in the gaming industry caused you hearing loss, tissue injuries or shoulder issues, you are eligible to file a claim in the UK. How does this work? If you can prove that your employer breached their duty by either:
- Poorly managing the working environment (if the space is too cluttered, you can trip and suffer injuries)
- Failing to control risk factors (if they could’ve minimized hazardous circumstances, but they didn’t, and that caused you an injury)
- Not training you properly (if you haven’t received manual handling training and that caused you muscle issues)
To ensure that you’re at an advantage in this case, you can talk to your solicitor and agree upon a No Win No Fee claim, where you won’t pay any upfront fees. There’s only a success fee that you will pay only if the solicitor won your case and you got your compensation. The amount of money you will receive depends on the nature and severity of your injury.
Pandemic opportunities
The pandemic has forced many industries to shut down, but not the gaming sector. With people mostly inside their houses, what else could you do other than play video games and watch movies? This is where gaming brought people together. Streaming video games caused an extraordinary rise in viewership by 83%. People felt more connected to professional gamers, and this is how communities formed. Gaming streamers can easily live off their viewers’ donations and partnerships with certain platforms.
People also took the opportunity of staying home to start their streaming channels and form smaller communities that enjoy the same games, and you can see this through the watching hours statistics that went up to 45% in only one month.
Esports
Electronic sports have become a form of competition that’s now one of the most popular gaming events in the world. Even if some people are still reluctant to call gaming a sport, professionals think it requires skillful executions and precise timing. These tournaments are being live-streamed on online platforms, with watching hours increasing year by year (only in the first quarter of 2022, the reported number was 6,129 million hours only on one platform). With that being said, you can guess that professional players are successful. Last year, the net worth of the best gamer was estimated at around 17 million dollars. Like him, many other rich gamers started playing more than ten years ago and gained popularity and fans.
Most professionals start participating in tournaments when they’re around 16 years old and retire at 24. Even if it’s a profitable experience and you can get rich if you’re good enough, most players get tired after a while because the environment seems too intense and toxic. Hence, most of them decide to stop competing and start online streaming.
A look into the future
All companies are aware of the potential young people hold when it comes to gaming, and that’s why many of them are heavily paying professionals that are winning in competitions. For example, in 2021, the victorious team in the DOTA championship was rewarded with 18,208,300 US dollars, and it seems like the prize amount is increasing every year. Therefore, the global market revenue in the Esports industry was forecast to grow up to 1,62 billion US dollars in 2024. Asia and North America represent the largest markets in terms of revenue.
Usually, many factors contribute to this revenue, like media, sponsorships and publishers who own the intellectual property of each game. Therefore, they can change the terms regarding the payment for teams. In the gaming industry, game developers and publishers give the power to the players to value their games, which influences the trends and popularity of a game. For example, Fortnite, one of the most successful games, blew up not after being published, but after gamers started playing it and changed the way people perceived the game.
Another game that blew up years after publishing was Among Us. From 2018 to 2020, people didn’t know about its existence, but when streamers were playing it seriously, the game went off worldwide.
Final thoughts
Can professional gaming be considered a reliable source of revenue for people? Yes. Is it a career for the future? Also, yes. Playing games got to a level where people joined streaming platforms to build an audience and offer them quality entertainment. Starting from tournaments and gaining popularity will propel normal people into becoming rich at a young age. But first, you must become one of the best to reach that point, which requires a lot of practice.
