Home » Blog » Gaming » How to Become a Professional Gamer
If you love video games and want to make it your full-time job…well, you’re probably not alone. The big question is where to begin. For most people, the idea of gaming for money never makes it beyond entering some tournaments with friends. No shame in such tournaments, of course, but they might not lead to the big break into the gaming world you want. Learning some of the steps taken by big-time gamers to get where they wanted can help you map a course. Without a plan, it might never happen. Today we go over some of the best advice on how to become a professional gamer.
Pick a game
You need a steady game in which you specialize. Being an enthusiast for many games, while helpful to get your skills up, won’t win you much money. So, you’ve got to pick one game and become the master. If you go with a well-established game, the prizes can be more lucrative and tournaments more frequent. However, popular games come with a lot of competition. Games everyone with which everyone is familiar means there’s a much larger pool of talented gamers to draw from. Competition can be stiff! That being said, lesser-known games offer smaller payouts, and there’s no guarantee that they ever gain enough prominence to be worth your time in the long run. So it’s a gamble either way. Finding the sweet spot between unknown and totally ubiquitous games, at least to start, might be the best bet.
Get Involved in Your Game’s Community
Check forums and figure out who’s who on your games on websites like Twitch and Mixer. The biggest players will be known and talked about. You can become involved on the boards and streams for your game. As you do, you’ll become a part of a community of like-minded gamers. Such a community provides support, but even better it gives you access to friends who might know something you don’t. Tips for playing better, ideas to get involved in tournaments you’re interested in, and so on. Getting into the community is essential to success.
Practice Skills
Practice makes perfect, right? In the case of video gaming, it’s not just about gaming 10+ hours a day. It’s also about spending time practicing skills. Lebron James spent hundreds of hours playing the game, but he also spends hundreds of more hours practicing free-throws.
This goes for skills within the game, as well as physical conditioning (eye-hand coordination and muscle endurance). Picking a skill and drilling it till you’re perfect is the way to stand out from the crowd that plays the game at least as much as you do. Gaining habits that automatically take over in the heat of the game allows you to focus on strategy and leave the individual skills to the practice arena.
Get a mentor, Find a team
This is true for even solo games. Play with people who are better than you, or who are better at different things than you. You can try out for teams, or if you’re really excellent, the teams will come to you. Regardless of how it happens, find a way to learn from others who know what they’re doing. If you constantly play with those you know you can beat, you never improve. Similarly, if you only play alone or with random people online, you can’t guarantee your improvement in the areas you need to improve. You’ll fall back on bad habits without realizing it. You need friends to burst your bubble, take you out of your comfort zone, and force you to play better than ever before. You’ll never make it as a pro otherwise.
Something else to bear in mind, of course, is to find role models to look up to. Pro gamers know how they got where they are, and following them might help you learn the path. Check out some of the amazing visionary gamers we work with at GUNNAR.
