Interested in living in a pro-gaming/streaming house here in Aus?
G'day!
I'm starting to gather some contacts for people that might be interested in living in a full time Pro-Gaming/Streaming/YouTubing house withing a couple of months.
BACK STORY
A while back I went full time on YouTube and will be moving into streaming myself in the next few months. The problem is I currently have 0.8mb/s upload speed... I'm sure many of you share my frustrations here.
Me and my girlfriend Amy have been looking for houses with NBN and have found that getting a house for reasonable rent for two people with *cable* NBN is rather difficult. Fixed Wireless locations is a backup option but it's not optimal for streaming.
Today we discovered that getting a 4-6 room house that is nice and somewhere with cable is actually a lot more economical when you can split it with 1-3 other people.
Combining this with my need to move into streaming and Amy's dream of one day running a B&B and we started to come up with an idea...
THE IDEA
The general idea is to have a house with split rent and multiple cable connections for uber internet. Food/utilities/net/housework would all be included and managed by the lovely Amy, who gets to live out her B&B dreams full time.
This idea is quite exciting because:
- It is a more economic way for myself and a number of other people to either move into or continue their full time work in gaming.
- Provides time and an environment to focus on our business, similar to what you'd see in an SC2 team house.
- Having a bunch of motivated people working in the same industry makes for a lot of collab opportunities and allows people to inspire each other.
- There's very little capital expenditure and risk, it'll be about on par with moving into a house with friends while in university.
OCCUPANTS PROFILE
Looking for people that are already fulltime or who are close to going fulltime with circumstances preventing them. If you can pull about $1000 to $1500 a month from YouTube/Streaming/Coaching/etc then you should be able to afford it and some basic entertainment. We're aiming for the $250-300 a week mark per person (includes meals, rent & utilities). It'll scale cheaper with more people as well.
You could also be someone who's just looking for an extended gaming holiday and have a bit of money saved up to live off. If 6 months of hardcore gaming with everything else taken care of sounds good then this might be right up your alley
If you are a big drinker or spender then you may have to consider what you can sacrifice to go fulltime I'm managing to live personally off of $1000 a month income from YouTube, it's tough but possible.
LOCATION
Leaning heavily towards the Central Coast with Sydney or Melbourne areas as backups. Which one of those depends on appropriate houses with cable and people who want to live in them
WHAT NOW?
So, current goal is to talk to as many Aussies as possible who are currently full time gaming or who can foreseeably go fulltime if they move into an environment where they can work efficiently (have savings to cover them for 6 months). Through talk we can discover what it is people are looking for out of something like this and if there are enough people in this country to set this up.
That last part will be the biggest challenge as the Aussie scene is pretty infant.
So, if this sounds like a dream come true to you then either reply here or shoot me an email at gaminghouse@ziggyd.tv
ZiggyD
___________________________________ Daniel 'ZIGGYD' Coutts-Smith YouTube Twitter
Last edited by ZiggyD; Wed, 16th-Oct-2013 at 5:41 PM.
Seems like a good idea and all, only problem is people will need to work to get money to pay rent. Meaning they cant actually do it full time anyway.
Where is the house going to be located?
Ah thanks you reminded me of a few details to be added.
Looking for people that are already fulltime or who are close to going fulltime with circumstances preventing them. If you can pull about $1000 to $1500 a month from YouTube/Streaming/Coaching/etc then you should be able to afford it and some basic entertainment. We're aiming for the $250-300 a week mark per person (includes meals, rent & utilities). It'll scale cheaper with more people as well.
That said, I don't have problems if people have casual or part time work as well to help them get by haha. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to make your dreams happen.
And location will be Central Coast (preferred) Sydney or Melbourne areas. Which one of those depends on houses and people who want to live in them
___________________________________ Daniel 'ZIGGYD' Coutts-Smith YouTube Twitter
Last edited by ZiggyD; Mon, 14th-Oct-2013 at 2:20 PM.
if your making only 1k a month from youtube your not affording $250-300 per week.
That said does my $30 a month from youtube count me as living off youtube now? It pays half the phone bill! :P
If that pays for food, rent, utilities and internet then I would say it is earning a living! Professional gamers spend most of their time gaming as both work and entertainment so there's not much else you need money for!
It depends on how you want to live in the end. If you want to earn more money to buy *stuff* then you probably should stick with a day job. Most progamers/streamers/etc instead choose to earn a lot less to follow their passion
___________________________________ Daniel 'ZIGGYD' Coutts-Smith YouTube Twitter
Update: we might be able to get started sooner than thought!
Here's the style of houses we're looking at: http://www.realestate.com.au/propert...ield-411533523
This size would be suitable for ourselves +2 other people (even if they have partners). We've also looked at some 5 bedroom ones which could go up to +3 people.
ZiggyD seems to have a really nice set-up in place for youtube; I just watched his "I'm Going Full Time With Youtube" video, and I have to say I'm impressed. Also Lokth, he mentioned that he lives with someone else and they would be paying for bills/costs of living together.
A house is something that has come up on these forums several times, I'm sure we're all aware; and every time it's been shot down. It seems that a lot of people aren't able to afford to pay for these sorts of things, particularly because most of our regions best players are being paid government money and/or being supported by their parents. Lots of people tend to resign themselves to the fact that we're too isolated from the rest of the Starcraft world, partially due to sub-par internet, but mostly due to distance and cost of travel to and from large scale events. For a player to be able to support and afford to live in a house like you're trying to offer here, they would need to be receiving funds from either commercial sponsors or the community.
Truth be told, we don't really have any player with a strong enough community backing to earn a living from youtube, or anything even remotely along those lines. The fact that most players that stream do so in 360-480p is an immediate turn off for a lot of potential viewers as well, so that's preventing a lot of our guys from getting the exposure that they would need in order to turn SC2 into a profession, or at least something that pays the bills. And when you aren't getting the exposure needed, sponsors are turned off even more.
So, I would go so far as to say the idea of a house for full-time Starcraft gamers in the SEA region atm is unsustainable. But there are always exceptions, there's always the possibility that some player rears his head and says that he can get financial backing from 'x' source. Just don't hold your breath for it.
Yeah, this might well be the case, especially in the Aussie pro-gamer scene. I just wanted to throw the idea here as well just in case anyone was wanting to take the plunge. I have a soft spot for SC2 so wanted to recruit from here first.
I'll also be getting applicants through Boom, the Australian YouTube network. At VidINc a couple of months back I met a ton of full time gaming YouTubers there, the scene is starting to take off in Aus. So hopefully I can pull a few people from there. We'll see though, we might be doing this a year or two too early.
___________________________________ Daniel 'ZIGGYD' Coutts-Smith YouTube Twitter
Update: we might be able to get started sooner than thought!
Here's the style of houses we're looking at: http://www.realestate.com.au/propert...ield-411533523
This size would be suitable for ourselves +2 other people (even if they have partners). We've also looked at some 5 bedroom ones which could go up to +3 people.
if you got a house with 5+ rooms then you could easily but bunkbeds and stuff in each room if there are alot of people interested, which would also mean the cost of living etc would not be so expensive for each player/person/women.
just saying should take this idea into consideration aswell!
___________________________________ TheKidBuffalo
Known for a time as eCKo`Mudflap and then TheKidBuffalo
Even the smallest donations help keep sc2sea running! All donations go towards helping our site run including our monthly server hosting fees and sc2sea sponsored community tournaments we host. Find out more here.