Fear, mostly.
One of the most popular and respected gamers in the world of CounterStrike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) retired last month from Cloud9 after a highly successful run with the professional gaming group. Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek told his boss that he wanted to focus full-time on streaming on Twitch.
While this move was met with sadness by many of his ardent fans, they quickly followed him to his newest profession: video game streamer. On Twitch, he is still known as Shroud. Now, however, one could call him Mr. Shroud. Immediately after his retirement and move to Twitch became public news, his stream vaulted into the most watched stream almost immediately.
On any given day when Shroud streams, as many as 35,000 people are watching him play Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) for hours at a time. Not only that, but his fans are richly rewarding him for the opportunity to watch him slay new opponents mercilessly for hours every day. A subscription to Shroud's channel costs $5 and gives the subscriber special chat privileges. Shroud takes home roughly $3.50 of that (and possibly more if he has negotiated with Twitch recently). Within his first three weeks of streaming full-time he went from under 10,000 subscribers a month to over 30,000. Taking the conservative approach that he earns $3.50 per subscriber (and that he maintains or surpasses these numbers consistently), that means he earns over $100,000 per month on subscriber fees alone.
Factor in the multitude of daily donations that he also gets (the highest single donation I've seen him get personally is $1,300 at one time), and I wouldn't be surprised if he clears another $10,000 a month from those and that's being conservative. Don't forget that he also gets a fair bit from outside sponsorship and ads. He's also been discussing Shroud-themed merchandise.
All this means is that Shroud has positioned himself to be hugely popular and successful for years to come. With an estimated annual income of at least $1.3 million (and that's probably a low number; YouTube revenue isn't included), Shroud has the means and ability to brand himself in a unique and enviable way in the land of professional streaming.
Personally, I never knew who Shroud was before he appeared full-time on Twitch last month. I enjoy PUBG and watched a few other streamers play it. However, once I started watching Shroud's stream I realized what a top-level gamer looked like. More than that, Shroud's calm and laid-back personality makes it easy to watch/listen to him for hours at a time. I wish him much success and plan on watching him for a long time to come.
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