A few weeks ago, I was in a Praxis group discussion talking about a book we’re reading called The Last Safe Investment. During this call we were talking about our best and worst investments. As we were going through our worst self-investments another participant said something along the lines of playing video games. I had mentioned that depending on what you’re playing and how you play, video games could be a great and rewarding investment. Thus, this blog post was born! My top six ways video games can earn you money.
- Steam Market
Steam Market? Why would somebody want to buy Steam? No, Steam is a “digital distribution platform developed by Valve Corporation, which offers digital rights management, multiplayer gaming, video streaming and social networking services” – Wikipedia. Just so happens that you can also sell in game items on their market place.
For example, we’ll be looking at a popular game called Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds. Now the way it works is in the game you get Battle Points or BP for short. You get BP for killing someone, winning, hit points, or the longer you survive. What do you do with the BP though? Well you can exchange them for in-game crates. These crates have a random percentage of what item they’ll drop. Some items are rarer and some are more common. These items can be sold for a lot of money depending on the rarity. At one point this jacket was sold for $1,536.81! A lot of games have these in game items that you can sell online for a profit.
- G2A.com
G2A is similar to Steam in that it is a digital marketplace platform. The way it works is if you have a Steam key or a key from another platform being Uplay, Origin, or even Humble Bundle then you can sell it. You go to the market place and you put the product key up and when someone purchases it the funds go to you and a cut for G2A. It’s a great platform for buying games on sale and then selling them for a return online.
- Selling Characters
To sell a character means you play a game and max out the characters levels and then sell it to someone online who doesn’t want to put the work in. Here is a great Reddit post of a guy who’s done just that and was making $100,000 yearly! There are a lot of games that will ban you for this and some that encourage it! So, make sure you check before you decide to get into this.
- Twitch.com
Twitch is a live streaming video platform that allows people to actively grow communities and fans while online streaming games. Fans are allowed to subscribe in 3 different tiers. Tier one is $5 while tier 2 and 3 are $10 and $25 monthly. The streamer gets half the subscription while the other half goes to twitch. On-top of that you can donate to your favorite streamers and all of that goes to your favorite streamer without getting split up with twitch. People have been seen donating anywhere between 2 dollars to a whopping $100,000! Now of course I don’t believe if you’re going to stream that you should be solely just in it for the money. I believe you should be doing it for having fun with other people, to meet new people and to create communities of like-minded people.
- Let’s Plays On YouTube
YouTube is the #1 site for viewing anything and everything so it’s no surprise it’s on here. Fun fact do you know who the #1 most subscribed youtuber is? His name is Felix Kjellberg or also known as Pewdiepie. With a whopping 61.8+ millions subscribers he’s created great content for years. What is his content you might ask though? Well his starting content was playing, you guessed it, video games! In fact, Swedish newspaper Expresen reported he made $7.4 million in 2014. There are plenty of other channels who have made their livings off of playing video games to writing theories about games! Game theory is one of those channels who have done such things and has 9.9 million subscribers.
- Esports
Esports is video game sports to put it simply, like football and soccer. A lot of people tune in online and go to stadiums to watch! It’s got only the best pro players into one room competing among each other. They’re building new stadiums all over the world. In Texas they’re building one to house 1,000 spectators. Esports has more than 380 million fans that watch from all over the world. That’s not even the best part. There’s a prize pool too. Currently the biggest prize pool has been $24,687,919.00! If you’d like to check out other prize pools click here!
Toby Lopez 