Can Gaming Be A Career?
What does a 9 year old want to become when he grows up? A superhero? An astronaut? An F1 driver? A rockstar? Then he grows up and wants to become something else; A doctor? A lawyer? An engineer? A successful business man perhaps? Not many of us think “Oh I want to become a professional gamer” at any point in life. Neither do many of us know the scope of being a professional gamer, so let’s explore what goes around in the world of a professional gamer.
Earnings
This may sound odd but some professional gamers actually earn way more than our highest earning doctors and engineers. Pakistan’s very own Sumail Hassan who has so far earned $3,265,914.94. for himself just by playing a video game. We’ll save ourselves the trouble of converting that to Pakistani Rupees and let you do the honors. Now if you thought that is too much you should know how much professional DOTA 2 player Kuro Takhasomi has made by gaming. So far he has actually earned… wait for it… $4,097,926.95. The list of gamers who earn this much or less goes on and if we start naming all of them then this article would be way too long for you to finish in one go. Not only do exceptional players earn from winning, streaming also brings them heavy bucks, if you don’t already know, Fortnite streamer Ninja actually makes $500,000 per month.
Competitions
Esports tournaments have humungous prize pools, so much that if you win one of the prominent ones you will be set up for the rest of life, not even kidding. Let’s bring in some stats to prove our point. The Boston Major 2016 and The Kiev Major 2017 had a prize pool of $3million each. The LoL 2016 World Championship had a prize pool of $5.07million and the biggest of all, The International 2018 had a prize pool of $25.53 million.
Sponsorships
Coca Cola, Intel, Mountain Dew, Redbull and Audi are amongst the many top business giants to sponsor Esports tournaments and teams. Not only that, last year in October, Nike officially signed a sponsorship deal with their first ever Esports player Jian ‘‘Uzi’’ Zihao who is a famous Chinese Esports legend
Fame
Money is not the only thing that comes with an Esports career, along comes fame. The most talented of Esports players are referred to as influencers and have huge social media followings. A large mass of people actually trust their word, learn from them and respect them to a great extent. Let us name the top 2 Esports influencers with the most followers; Matthew Piper, popularly known as FormaL, is a Call of Duty Champion playing for Optic Gaming with more than 88,000 active Instagram followers. Above him, is Peter Dager, popularly known as ppd, who is a professional Dota 2 player and at one point was the CEO of Evil Geniuses. He surprisingly has over 148,000 followers on Twitter and is very well known amongst DOTA 2 player
