How to Get Paid for Playing Video Games

Wouldn't it be great to sit at home all day playing video games and actually get paid for it? Sound impossible? Well, it's actually not. There are several different ways you can get paid for playing video games. Some are more difficult than others, and some involve making much more money than others, but the good news is that just about anyone can make a little bit of money from playing video games.

The first way is to become a video game tester for a video game company. These companies need beta testers to try out all of their games before they publish them. While this type of gaming job can be one of the more difficult video game jobs to get, it often pays the most. Working as a video game tester involves playing games that are slightly unfinished.

What companies need is for people to play through these unfinished games and find any errors or bugs that the programmers may have missed. This allows the programmers to fix these programs before the game is sold, making it a much better game overall. For this type of video game job, it's important that you have good writing skills so you can write error reports. You also need to have an eye for details, especially small things that others might not notice.

The second type of job you can get that lets you play video games and make money is writing video game reviews and articles for gaming magazines. In this case, you'll most likely be playing finished games, although if you get hired by a major video game magazine, you may get the chance to play a demo or a copy of the game sent out for press review. This type of video game job obviously requires very good writing skills. You may be asked to write a variety of articles such as previews, reviews, character bios, and tips for games.

Get Paid To Play Video Games

There are two types of magazine writing jobs. You can work as a freelance writer. This type of job allows you to write and sell video game related articles to any publication you like. On the downside, magazines usually only purchase a few articles from freelancers—most of their articles come from people on their writing staff. That's the second kind of job: getting hired as a permanent writer for one magazine. It's harder to secure one of these jobs, but they pay very well, and you're guaranteed to have an article or two in almost every issue. Also, don't forget online gaming sites. They need writers, too, and while some of them don't pay, some of them pay just as much as print publications.

Finally, there's something everyone can do to make money: start a blog about video games and place ads on it. If your writing is top quality and you get your blog out there where many people start reading it, you can make a nice amount of extra money doing this. It also gives you practice writing about video games and gives you sample articles you can send to magazines and game companies.