Some of the ways you make money streaming through deals with brands include: Sponsorships, where your whole streams are sponsored by a brand. Banners and other types of advertisements you can display during your streams or on your channel or profile page on the platform. Sponsored content, like when a game developer pays you to play their game. Twitch is the largest video game streaming platform worldwide with 15 million daily viewers. This is our top pick for reaching a large audience which, ultimately, should be our goal if looking to earn money by playing. However, with such a large creator population it can be difficult for beginners to get noticed.

While it was once a relatively niche interest, the concept of watching people play video games has started to expand to a widespread mainstream activity.

It sounds almost too crazy to be true, but one only needs to look at the most-subscribed channels on YouTube to figure it out.

More than a handful of the top 20 channels are exclusively dedicated to streaming video games.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just uploading videos of you playing popular video games.

People come for the experience!

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That means that most of the popular footage revolves around the gamer’s commentary on the gameplay as much as it does the gameplay itself.

You could consider a lot of these channels to be video-game themed podcasts, essentially. And if you want to get paid for basically playing games like these guys, all you need to do is stream as you play.

Once upon a time, gameplay footage online mostly revolved around “walkthroughs”. Essentially, this would mean that a gamer would record themselves doing something difficult or hidden on the game, so that other gamers could watch it and then do those things themselves, like a tutorial.

These knowledge-based videos eventually evolved into the ‘Let’s Play’ phenomenon we know today, with famous and unknown people alike all broadcasting videos of themselves talking and playing a variety of games.

How To Earn Money By Game Streaming Free

As YouTube’s monetization started to take off, many people actually built careers on this– careers that are now threatened with YouTube’s flippant copyright-removals.

So what were people to do, with an eager audience, but an unreliable platform?

Enter TwitchTV, a service dedicated to letting gamers stream their gameplay, connect with audiences, and get paid while they do it.

Twitch exploded onto the scene with a phenomenon called “Twitch Plays Pokemon“- An experimental playthrough where the people in the chat were allowed to control the game (all at once, simultaneously). Hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch and join in; it was crazy, it was chaotic, and it was iconic.

While Twitch existed before that, this really put them on the map.

Shortly after, Twitch was purchased by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars (a clever move by Amazon to get in on that gameplay-streaming ad money that YouTube was hogging).

Now Twitch is nearly ubiquitous, enjoying a meteoric rise towards the top-5 websites on the entire internet. Their net worth and their audience grow every day.

So How Does Streaming Games Work on Twitch TV?

Let’s start with a basic overview of streaming and how it works.

You are probably familiar with the concept of streaming by now, but just to recap: streaming means providing a live feed of the game that you’re playing, essentially like broadcasting your computer or TV screen. While this was once an ability enjoyed only by PC users, the options have now been expanded to video game consoles as well.

This live feed goes on while you play, you’ll need to learn to talk!

Next to this video stream are two things: the footage of the game being played (in real-time) and a smaller, picture-in-picture video of the gamers themselves.

The gamer narrates their gameplay as they go, which is where a lot of the art comes in; if you get quiet and determined a chat box where viewers post comments in real-time.

This is how they connect to you, the gamer.

Unlike YouTube, where videos are made, edited, and posted, Twitch is a person-to-person connection in real time.

Twitch streamers relate to each of the people, and ideally, communicate with them during streaming.

That’s the personal touch.

How Do I Make Money?

You make money in three ways on Twitch:

1. Ads

This is the most basic and most profitable way of monetizing your game streaming channel.

In this case, you let Twitch play ads on your channel, they take their cut and pay you. It’s simple and clean but won’t pay big dollars unless you have a lot of viewers.

2. Tips

Believe it or not, people do actually pay you to watch you stream games while you play!

This is what makes the Twitch platform fairly unique – users can put money in your “tip jar” which causes a small notification on-screen.

You might call this a double-edged sword. On one hand, charming streamers can see huge chain reactions of donations come in, which is great. On the other hand, you have to find a way to act graciously for every single donation, lest the donator feel cheated (and that’s harder than it sounds)!

Make Money Streaming Games

3. Subscription

The final method is subscription.

Just like you would pay for a magazine subscription to keep getting it (although there are ways to get free magazines subscriptions without paying!), here the viewers subscribe to the channel for a small fee.

Essentially, this means that a donor will pay a small fee to subscribe to you, usually about $5. In return, you can post videos to a special “Subscribers Only” section of your channel. VIP content, essentially.

Subscription is pretty great but by far the least common way to get paid on Twitch.

OK, make sense so far?

Let’s get into what you need to do Twitch streaming.

What Equipment Do I Need?

The equipment you need is largely dependent on what equipment you already have.

To elaborate, you’ll need one of these things:

A fairly strong PC (generally, in-box, prebuilt computers won’t be strong enough) OR a modern video gaming console. PS4s and Xbox Ones are built with this streaming functionality in mind, and they’ll work just fine.
Camera/Mic: You want (ideally) some kind of camera for recording your face/reactions. A microphone for the all-important narration factor. And a capture card (if you’re on PC). Capture cards are little devices that are dedicated to capturing the footage on your computer.

No lie; the equipment end of being a streamer is a little bit of a pain. You need these things, and then you’ll need to configure them (luckily, there are handy guides on the Twitch site).

Not great fun, but hey if you were ever going to do something tedious, wouldn’t it be for something dreamy like getting paid to play games?

What Software Do I Need?

OK, almost to the fun part…

First, we just need to clear up some stuff about software.

Twitch is a streaming platform, but it is not a streaming software.

That means that there is no Twitch program to run on your computer for streaming – Twitch is just the place the video is sent to.

You’ll need a software called Open Broadcaster Software.

It’ll require a little one-time fiddling to get right; setting bitrates and other complicated stuff like that.

If you’re not tech-savvy, DO NOT be intimidated! There are tons of guides for this stuff that will get you through, no problem. Don’t be misled to assume this is only for computer wizards!

After you get that configured, it’s time to finish setting up the channel!

How to Start Your Channel

I won’t type up a huge guide about how to run a successful channel; there have been better ones written already, and more importantly, it would take far too much time to talk abo