Originally Posted by
Not4you
I still lurk a bit. I have a wheel & pedals to get you started if you want ...
There are a lot of good points here, but I may add a few.
I guess first off, is he 'just' playing all the time or is he actually wanting to take it serious and make a career out of it? If the former, there is no gain and he is wasting his time. Sure it may be fun and all, but at 18 he should probably be thinking of college/university and/or full employment by now. If the latter, while it is a serious longshot (1 in a million maybe) there could be some potential to make something of it.
I know a lot of creators, who are really good players, who get regular audiences of 2-5 people per stream/video. The few I know that are successful - one could probably be a stand up comic with legit on screen carisma, one is a world champion now racing in the WEC, and another posts up daily content spanning usually 5-10 different games plus now a real life home improvement show. It takes more than just being good while playing in your parents basement. All these guys have enormous personality, they put on a show while playing.
Successful creators also spend surprising little time actually playing the games. A 20 minute youtube video upload may involve 2 hours of planning/scripting, 2 hours of gameplay, and 4-6 hours of editing, production, still photography, processing, uploading. So a simple daily upload eats up a full day of "work". But to maintain a daily schedule (extremely important to early success), they may be planning weeks in advance, putting in the time and effort and money to keep the content pipeline full. 10+ hour days, 7 days a week, non-stop. So to make a serious go at something he is currently playing 'all the time', he's going to need to stop playing in order to get the content out to bring in the money. It becomes more than a full time job. And burnout is real. So many hugely successful creators have left the industry due to fatigue and often serious mental health reasons.
And this is assuming he has an audience who are waiting anxiously for every new upload to maintain views. He'd likely need to quickly build a following of maybe a few thousand subscribers/followers and get 1000+ views on every piece of content to make some money. Then as it grows he could start a patreon and hope for monthly donations. But the audience will need to be getting more than just good gameplay - thats a dime a dozen, or more accurately fractions of a penny for millions. Twitch and Youtube are overwhelmed in content. His would need to stand out from the masses. Millions upload daily with no views, what would make his rise to the top?
And this assumes Fortnite is still trending hot longterm. But I wouldn't count on that for a career. Very few games have the staying power that allows guys to keep pushing out content year over year. If he can diversify and create content for 5-10 games regularly that could help negate the chances that one stops trending. But even one a day across 7 games is only a weekly upload - and that likely won't fly unless he already has the audiences built up.
It sounds like he has his gaming stuff in place, but what about the other 'studio' things? Face cam, lighting, microphones, a second computer dedicated to processing and uploading etc etc.
One last thing to keep in mind - like Minecraft, and a lot of other big games, Fortnite was designed specifically to trigger key conditions of addiction. Resource gathering, survival, time pressure, achievements, looting, competition, fast movements, bright colours. It checks a lot of boxes on a psychological level to addict. So you'll likely want to get to the bottom of this with him. Is he addicted, or just passionate?