You throw hundreds of hours a year into your games. You slaughter millions on Fortnight and Conquer worlds in Civilization.
But then work drags you away from your gaming. You sit in a cubical designed to homogenize souls while surrounded by automatons that don’t know they are alive. There must be something better.
There is. You can make money from gaming.
You can shake off the shackles that lock most of society in an inescapable state of unease and unhappiness. You can give the 9-to-5 the 12 o-clock middle finger and say, “No, I’m doing things differently. I’m doing it my way!”
There are essentially 4 main ways to make money from your gaming hobby. They include blogging, Youtubing, streaming, and making games.
In the following sections, I’ll deep-dive into these methods of making money from gaming so you can decide for yourself which is the best moneymaking method for you. Let’s start with my personal favorite, game blogging.
Making Money From Gaming: Blogging
One of the first and easiest ways to make money from gaming is to write about it. You’ve probably read multiple publications that focus on gaming. From magazines, such as PC gamer, two websites like you’re a gamer, each of which makes a vast amount of money from writing about games.
And you can write about games and make money from them by creating a blog.
Taking the form of a website that is hosted on a server, a blog is a small to medium-sized website home to thousands of articles. These articles take the form of any subject the human mind and bear to conceive. And I’m sure many that we can’t. They often use software such as WordPress or even something more exotic such as Joomla!.
However, blogs basically all do the same thing. They allow individuals or teams to host articles of any type for people to discover through search engines such as Google.
Now, as a gamer wanting to make money from blogging, you can go down many different avenues. You can create a gaming blog about:
- – A particular type of game, such as RPGs. For example, I write articles about Skyrim alchemy ingredients such Void Salts.
- – A game franchise such as the Halo series
- – A Single game such as Fortnight
- – Reviewing games
- – Gaming News
As you can see, there are several ways to make money by blogging about games. And the list above is literally just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of things you can write about to make money from gaming.
How do you actually make money from your writing? Well, you can make money from a Gaming blog in many ways. The main methods fall under the following categories:
- – Advertising
- – Selling sponsored content placements
- – Affiliate marketing
- – Selling services
- – Selling digital products
- – Selling physical products
Each category has pros and cons that need to be accounted for. Plus, there are many subcategories and nuances to each of these moneymaking methods.
If you’d like to learn more about starting a gaming blog, I suggest you look at my “What is a gaming blog” guide.
Next up, I’ll look at how to make money from game streaming.
Making Money From Gaming: Streaming
If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard of Twitch. Twitch is the number one streaming service in the world for gamers. Whether you’re watching Fortnite players battle it out after a hard day’s work, or you’re creating a fan base numbering in the millions, Twitch will let you do it.
The Twitch platform, which first started streaming in 2011, is unrivaled as a streaming platform. The platform is addictively gamified, making it a joy to use for most gamers.
If you think streaming is your thing, you’re in luck. It’s easy to get started with Twitch. All you need to do is type in Twitch on Google, head to their website, and sign up. You can begin watching streamers immediately.
Have you got a PlayStation 4 or Xbox? Then flick the on switch and start streaming from them right now. It takes less than 5 minutes to get started.
All you need to do is sign into Twitch on your console, click the share button on your controller, and start streaming. It’s as simple as that.
But how can you start making money as a streamer?
There are actually many different ways that are similar to blogging. But there are crucially a few extras that can increase your potential monetization vastly.
Ways to make money from streaming include:
- – Subscriptions
- – Donations
- – Affiliate sales
- – Add revenue
- – Selling digital products
As you can see, there are many ways to make money from streaming. Check back soon for my ultimate guide to starting and making money from game streaming.
PS. You’ll also need to plan a gaming room setup if you want to stream.
Making Money from Gaming: Youtube
Youtube and gaming go hand in hand. If you are interested in gaming, you’ve probably visited YouTube hundreds if not thousands of times and sub to some of the most prominent Gaming Youtubers in the world. Regardless of your gaming tastes and needs, there is something on YouTube for every gamer.
Youtube’s massive popularity with gamers makes it the ideal platform to turn your gaming hobby into a moneymaking side hustle.
I won’t lie; making videos is not easy. Editing videos is time-consuming, tiring, and makes you want to pull your hair out. But if you, for some reason, enjoy the pain of editing, YouTube can be a powerful way of making money.
The main ways to make money from Youtube are:
- – Advertising
- – Affiliate marketing
- – Sponsors
- – Selling digital products
- – Selling physical merchandise
As you can see, there are several ways to make bank with a gaming YouTube channel.
Building a Youtube gaming channel will hand you a one-way ticket out of your soul-destroying job if you work hard at it. Look at my article on how to grow a successful Youtube gaming channel.
Making Money from Gaming: Making games.
The most direct way of making money from your love of gaming is to make games or be part of the game industry.
Working in the game industry could be the perfect fit if you enjoy creating things or business.
There are literally hundreds of job types within the games industry. Some of which are directly related to gaming and some indirectly. But, regardless of the path you take, you’ll work and earn from your passion for games.
Some of the job categories for directly making games include:
- – Programmers
- – Engine developers
- – Designers
- – Artists
- – Writers
- – Sound designers
- – 3D Modellers
- – texture artist
- – Level designers
- – Game testers
However, the game industry isn’t limited to jobs directly associated with making games. Hundreds of positions are related to the game industry’s business side.
For example, games companies have:
- – Sales staff
- – Directors
- – CEOs
- – Managers
- – Project managers
- – Operations managers
- – Secretaries
- – Marketers
Harsh reality time
Ok, I couldn’t bring myself to write an article about making money from gaming without being totally and completely honest with you.
Making money from games is every gamer’s dream. How could it not be? After all, you snuggle into your favorite chair all day and hammer away games that bring you joy. And you get paid for it. It’s moneymaking magic.
But it isn’t magic. Making money comes down to pouring a dump truck load of work into your hobby for a chance, just a chance, of making a decent living full time.
Forget about the YouTube millionaires and the streamers throwing unspeakable sums of cash at FIFA’s Ultimate Team. These are the lucky ones, the hundred-plus players worldwide who walked down streaming avenue and tripped over the sack of cash.
The rest of us have to work, we have to hustle, we have to eke out growth. The rest of us are like saplings smothered under the oppressive canopy of the amazon rainforest, desperately twisting and turning in search of a morsel of light. Many don’t make it.
A blogger can write a novel’s worth of words. Yet search bots remain their only company. Some stream a hundred times to an empty room, only to be overcome with loneliness and despair.
Making money from gaming can seem hopeless, challenging, and punishing. I know this to be true because CareerGamers has had its lofty ups and gate-crashing into hell downs. This is one rollercoaster that makes you sick for all the wrong reasons.
Yet, there is light at the end of this grim tunnel.
Dedicate yourself to the craft of content creation, market your product, and you can succeed. Don’t expect to stream one night and fall out of bed the following day with Success knocking at the door holding a million-dollar check. That ain’t gonna happen.
But you can succeed if you can hunker down, practice, produce, promote, and repeat for 3 years.