Gaming possibly the safest job
Esports industry is booming in times of coronavirus pandemic
Ben Lupo sat in his basement in Omaha, Nebraska, one recent afternoon, trying to kill a brigade of heavily armed Russians before they killed him.
“I’m getting shot at already, dog,” he said into a headset, as the sound of machine guns echoed in the air. “So, this is not cool.”
Moments later, the Russians had cornered and finished him off — also not cool. It was a grisly end to an ill-fated campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a first-person shooter video game set in the fictional country of Urzikstan.
Lupo did not stew over his demise. He didn’t have time. About 13,000 people were watching him live on Twitch, the streaming platform where hordes of fans can pay to follow the best online gamers in the business. Few attract bigger crowds than Lupo, and since the coronavirus began forcing people to shelter in place, his crowds have only grown. He estimates that his viewership is up 25% to 30%.
“I feel,” he said in an interview, “like I’ve been preparing for this moment my whole life.”
It’s hard to think of a job title more pandemic-proof than “superstar livestreamer.” While the coronavirus has upended the working lives of hundreds of millions of people, Dr. Lupo, as he’s known to acolytes, has a basically unaltered routine. He has the same seven-second commute down a flight of stairs. He sits in the same seat, before the same configuration of lights, cameras and monitors. He keeps the same marathon hours, starting every morning at 8.
Social distancing? He’s been doing that since he went pro, three years ago.
For 11 hours a day, six days a week, he sits alone, hunting and being hunted on games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. With offline spectator sports canceled, he and other well-known gamers offer one of the only live contests that meet the standards of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Viewership numbers on Twitch leapt 31% from March 8 to March 22, according to Arsenal.gg, a data analytics firm. By then, 1 in 4 Americans was under shelter-in-place orders. During that two-week span, the numbers of hours a day watched on Twitch rose to 43 million from 33 million.
Lupo and his peers were having the best financial year of their lives even before
COVID-19 struck. Three of the biggest tech companies in the world — Microsoft, Facebook and Google — have been trying to raise the profile of their online gaming platforms: Mixer, Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming, respectively. Their goal is to catch up with Amazon, which owns Twitch and 70% of online gaming viewership.
“You’ve got the biggest tech companies in the world competing for the top talent to stream exclusively on their platform,” said Rod Breslau, who helped start the esports section of ESPN’s site. “That gives the talent agency that works for a guy like Lupo a huge amount of leverage to negotiate.”
In December, Breslau said, Twitch signed Lupo and two other streaming stars to multiyear deals worth millions. It was a counterattack of sorts. Over the summer, Tyler Blevins, who plays under the name Ninja and is widely considered one of the best Fortnite players in the world, left Twitch for Mixer in a multiyear deal reportedly worth as much as $30 million.
These are sums that may startle the uninitiated. But Lupo and Blevins are celebrities in a gaming industry that generates more than $150 billion a year in revenue, according to Newzoo, a gaming analytics company — more than double the global film and music industries combined.