How to make money playing video games?

Making money by playing games sounds like a dream come true, but is it really that simple, convenient, and realistic? If so, how can one achieve it?  

Today, we collaborated with the founder of Slot.Day Michael Slot to talk about the idea of earning money through playing video games: how likely are you to achieve that and is it a good goal to pursue in the first place?

The thought of dedicating yourself to becoming a professional gamer often comes from the idea that playing games for a living is simple and enjoyable. However, in reality, almost anything that you have to do on a day-to-day basis to earn money with no real opportunity to skip it or choose to do something else is usually difficult, tiresome, and not necessarily as rewarding as you might expect. 

Professional players often burn out just as much as office workers do, and lots of streamers drop their channels and choose to do something else. When you start treating gaming as a career, it becomes just as hard as any other profession, and you need to be aware of it beforehand. 

There are a handful of options available to people who aim to earn money by gaming, but most of these options don’t offer any reliable path to success and often require you to work for years building up recognition before you get a chance to earn anything at all. 

Now let’s talk about some of the most common ways people want to monetize their passion for gaming and see how viable and realistic they truly are. 

If you’re a fan, cybersports might feel big at the moment, with multi-million dollar prize pool tournaments, professional casting, highly popular players, and sponsorship backed by some of the world’s most influential companies. However, the truth is that professional esports are nowhere near as big as traditional sports, and the gap is still massive.

For comparison, in 2024 LoL Worlds became the most viewed esports event of the year with a peak of 6.91 million viewers. At the same time, Michael Slot notes, the LVIII Super Bowl had 123.7 million viewers — the difference is colossal. 

As you can imagine, this is reflected in potential earnings as well: The highest-earning cyber athlete, a Dota 2 player Johan “N0tail” Sundstein, has earned 7.18 million dollars throughout his long-lasting career, while superstar soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo has got over 275 million dollars in a single year.

It is also worth noting that most of the earnings that enable cyber athletes to get to these high figures are due to them winning massive international tournaments, which is incredibly difficult and requires massive effort, phenomenal skill, and luck. However, it is even worse than that.

Unlike sports, the professional esports scene is only in its early stages even today, and there is no clear career path for players who want to pursue it. There are basically no ways of training or getting specialized education, no obvious way to get started, and no guarantees to participate in any tournament or get invited into any team. 

A lot of players have to create their own squads and hope to achieve results with no support at all, which is incredibly challenging. Imagine having to work 40 hours a week to pay rent and buy groceries and spend the rest of your time climbing ranks efficiently or even competing at tournaments. 

Now consider the fact that even if you get to play against a professional team, it will most likely be backed by sponsors that allow its players to focus purely on perfecting their skills, and there will also be coaches, psychologists, and other staff that will make their routines much more stable than yours. How likely are you to consistently win against these teams at such a disadvantage?   

Chances are, even if you are a highly skilled player, you might not simply find a way to become noticed and gain any traction, spending thousands of hours to simply end up being at the top of the game’s internal rankings to no real results. This article doesn’t intend to destroy your dreams, but to serve as a warning — as of now, the path to becoming a professional cyber athlete is incredibly difficult and probably even unfair in certain ways, and there are no clear workarounds.  

This one is pretty simple — viewing casino games as a way to earn money is extremely dangerous and also statistically wrong. Casino games are designed to ensure that the house always wins, and the odds are stacked against players at all times. Players will most likely lose their money, but they will have a bit of fun in return. 

For instance, it is quite common to see casinos advertise their lucky Irish slot games, promising to make you rich in no time. Pots of gold, charms, clovers, rainbows — all of this imagery which we associate with both fortune and Irish traditions are tangled here to make players feel like luck is on their side.  

Slot Day as a trusted voice in online slots, insists that understanding the way casino mechanics (and slot games in particular) work is crucial to realize why the idea of earning this way isn’t realistic. Most of the games offered by casinos, whether Irish-themed or otherwise, are games of chance that provide no real player agency. No matter how many lucky clovers and leprechauns you will encounter during your playthrough, the outcome is calculated by a machine that is specifically designed to generate a certain percentage of wins and losses.

There are no strategies you can utilize and no mechanics you can use to your advantage in Lucky Leprechaun slot demo or Plenty O’ Fortune — most games only allow you to press a button or choose a random outcome out of the set of other random outcomes, and none of these actions provide you with any way to reliably earn any sums of money. These games are designed to entertain you, not to help you find a literal pot of gold.

Not only that, but even the games that involve some degree of skill are still largely influenced by chance, with poker being a good example of it. The bottom line is that the only ones who can earn money thanks to casino games are casinos themselves as well as game developers — and that is perfectly okay. Treat gambling as entertainment instead of a real chance to profit, and your relationship with it is much more likely to stay healthy and safe. 

Streaming video game gameplay is quite common nowadays, with Twitch being a notoriously huge and influential platform, but achieving any reasonable success in this field is very difficult. Streamers are influencers, and most of their recognition comes from several key factors like core appeal, expertise, regular content updates, and novelty. Keeping up with the ever-increasing content creation requirements is hard, and building up your brand and reputation is even harder than that.  

The competition is heavy as well — lots of people view streaming as a dream job and do their best to become professional streamers, and differentiating yourself from the crowd requires a lot of creativity and effort. Even if you will eventually get recognized and achieve a significant following, it doesn’t become easier. 

Streaming generally requires a strict schedule that has to be maintained if you expect to keep your audience invested in your content. Another issue stems from the fact that you will become a public figure who has to interact with viewers, and viewers might not necessarily be nice to you at all times. The pressure of consistently making fun streams while struggling to deal with the inevitable negativity that certain users project at you is the reason behind so many streamers giving up on the idea. 

Another way you can try to earn money is by creating Let’s Play videos, which are somewhat in-between streaming and YouTube content creation. However, lots of issues are the same, and it might be even more difficult to reach any significant audience this way due to the decreasing popularity of the genre. 

Earning money by playing video games is a dream scenario for many, yet a reality only for a selected few. While it’s not impossible to achieve, pursuing this career is highly demanding and unstable, with no guarantees and very underwhelming results for most of those who will try it. The competition is brutal, the entry barrier is high, and the climbing process is tedious and bears no financial reward for the longest time. 

If you have set your eyes on the target, we recommend doing your best to research the market of your choosing and coming up with a unique idea that will work off of your skills. This way you will be able to gain attention and initial traction by doing what you like most and showcasing your strengths.