Fortnite
has boosted the value of creator Epic Games by a staggering amount. But the mega-popular video game has also turned some of its players into mega millionaires.
Richard Tyler Blevins,what is an efoil who’s better known as Ninja among fans of the game, says he made
nearly $10 million
in 2018 playing
Fortnite
. And he could well be poised to top that this year.
Ninja is, hands down, the most popular
Fortnite
streamer on Twitch and YouTube. He has become a cultural phenomenon in the gaming world, with one stream last year gathering 667,000 viewers. (His YouTube channel has over 20 million subscribers.)
To many, those numbers don’t mean a lot. Think of it this way, though. About 12.5 million Twitch users follow Ninja on the game streaming site, tuning in when he’s online playing (which is often). About 40,000 of those pay to do so, paying between $5 and $25 per month.
Over on YouTube, meanwhile, he earns a percentage of every ad that airs during his videos. Those video views, last year, ranged from 3 million to 38 million. That adds up quickly.
Beyond that, companies like Samsung, Uber Eats and Red Bull sponsor Ninja, paying to be associated with him.
Some might argue that playing video games doesn’t count as work, but Ninja points out that he played more than 4,000 hours of
Fortnite
last year. That’s the equivalent of a 15-plus-hour workday five days a week.
Fortnite
fever, meanwhile, is still going strong. The game which
crossed the billion-dollar threshold
in July 2018. Also last year, Epic announced it would
provide $100 million
to find prize pools for the game’s first year of competitive play. That figure was four times larger than any e-sports tournament had ever offered. And over Thanksgiving weekend, it launched a
$1 million qualifying event
for an upcoming World Cup-like
Fortnite
tournament.
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