While both esports and video games are immensely popular around the world, there is still a lot of room for growth in the industry. However, the people who are spurring this new growth are a group of people that many would never expect, content creators. Often young and seen as lazy or inexperienced, content creators in gaming are people who generally play video games for a living. It may seem like something that is not lucrative, but many successful creators make millions of dollars a year. This puts them in a prime position to begin making video games and purchasing esports teams to mold them in their own vision.

Esports

Esports have become one of the most viewed types of entertainment on the planet. Giant global corporations like MasterCard have sponsored it, documentaries and movies have been made about it, and hundreds of millions of people have tuned in for it, Esports. Now, it is time for content creators, those who have made their careers playing video games, to invest their money back into gaming at the highest level.

Once a professional Hearthstone player, now a big streamer with millions of followers across multiple social media platforms, DisguisedToast purchased both a League of Legends semi-professional and Valorant Professional team. This undertaking cost him millions of dollars, but the potential return on his investment could pay him back his initial cost and much, much more. It can be seen in his viewership numbers; he normally averages 7,000 concurrent viewers per stream. When DisguisedToast streams his teams playing, he averages around 35,000, a 5X increase. This happens basically every time he streams his team playing, and this 5X increase in viewership equates to about a 5X increase in money generation from ads and sponsors.

DisguisedToast is only the most recent content creator to purchase an esport team. Moist Cr1tiKal purchased an Apex Legends and Valorant team in 2022 and has been seeing similar amounts of success. The most success for both of these content creators is yet to come, though. If any of their teams end up winning a tournament or season in their respective games, that is when they will see the biggest return on their investment; sponsors will be abundant, and new viewers will flood their social media.

Even the biggest content creator in the world, MrBeast, with over a billion social media followers, has confirmed that he will eventually buy a League of Legends team. Therefore, this trend of content creators creating/purchasing Esports teams is only going to grow. They are also probably the best people to own these teams; they know how to best market their teams, and they are often ex-professional esports players and know how to lead their teams by utilizing their prior pro experience.

Video Game Development

After being years of game developers not listening to their players, the players have finally decided that it is their turn to make games. Several content creators have hired entire teams of former game developers to create games, but instead of a board of directors who don’t play games making the decisions, it is a life-long gamer who is directing the development of their game. The world renowned first-person shooter (FPS) professional, shroud, is doing exactly this; he is creating an FPS that he believes will best all the games he went pro in. While it is still a couple of years away from release, this is a positive sign for the of game development for multiple reasons:

  1. Making money is not the main objective for this game. The main objective is creating a one-of-kind FPS that will hopefully set the standard for the genre.
  2. It is very easy to give feedback on the game, just @shroud on any socials or live streams.
  3. The game is still being created by the developers of games everyone loves, but the direction is being led by a life-long gamer.

Just like with esports, shroud is not the only content creator jumping into the game development bandwagon. The OTK network, a network of about a dozen large content creators, have just announced the creation of their own game development studio called Mad Mushroom. Among its staff, there are developers from Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games, and several other well known gaming companies, but the people directing them are the content creators that have made their career playing video games.

There are many other examples of content creators purchasing esport teams and/or making their own games, and this movement is only going to grow in the coming years. This is what the future of esports and video games looks like and it seems like a very bright future for the gaming industry.