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After dropping out in eighth grade to pursue esports, Cody Conrod wants to help others enter the increasingly expensive world of professional gaming.
The 21-year-old competitive Fortnite player, better known as Clix to his more than 8 million Twitch followers, already provides hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gaming equipment through an annual holiday giveaway. Through his new holding company, launched October 1, he is formalizing those efforts into the Dr3amin Access Fund.
Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular video games, features last-one-standing showdowns where players hunt down each other’s customizable avatars across an ever-shrinking map. Content creators have found loyal audiences by live streaming their exploits on platforms such as Twitch, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, and clipping the most eye-catching segments into viral short-form videos.
But the equipment needed to compete at higher levels is pricey—and getting pricier. The massive data center buildout has pushed up the costs of computers, graphics processors, and memory chips. Conrod recommends a setup that can handle at least 120 frames per second for a GPU-intensive game such as Fortnite. And even sub-$500, entry-level PCs are becoming scarcer, according to Joost van Dreunen, a longtime games industry researcher and adjunct assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
“Anybody who is starting up early in their career, anybody who is building their first PC, is having an increasingly difficult time finding hardware and components for it,” he said.
Esports is still a place where it’s “very hard to make a living,” according to van Dreunen. The real money is clustered at the top, he said, and there’s no “healthy” talent ecosystem. There’s also the stigma—many people still don’t view competitive gaming as a legitimate career, both he and Conrod emphasized.
Conrod hopes that by lifting the financial burden of buying a computer, he can get more parents to let their children test the professional limits of their hobby. “They also have to get good grades if they’re in school,” he added, noting that he made the “still delusional but a little less delusional” move to drop out only when he’d won “a good amount of money.”
This article was provided by The Associated Press.