Fortnite professional player Cody Conrod has launched the Dr3amin Access Fund to help aspiring esports competitors afford the computers and equipment needed to pursue gaming at a higher level.
Conrod, 21, is better known online as Clix and has more than eight million Twitch followers. The fund formalises the equipment giveaways he has already run through his annual Clixmas campaign, which has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gaming hardware.
The initiative is being established through Full Box Inc, a new holding company that also includes Conrod’s clothing brand, clipping agency and game studio. He said the company was inspired by MrBeast’s media empire, which houses the YouTube star’s commercial and philanthropic ventures.
Conrod is still working out how the fund will be financed. Some money from his clothing brand will support it, while other brands will be invited to contribute during Clixmas. He also plans to donate personally, having said he provided about $100,000 last year as five custom PCs were given away each day throughout December.
The cost of competing is rising as demand linked to large data-centre construction pushes up prices for computers, graphics processors and memory chips. Joost van Dreunen, a games industry researcher and adjunct assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said even entry-level PCs costing less than $500 were becoming harder to find.
“Anybody who is starting up early in their career, anybody who is building their first PC, is having an increasingly difficult time finding hardware and components for it,” Mr van Dreunen said.
Conrod recommends a system capable of running Fortnite at least 120 frames per second. He said his own parents could not afford an expensive gaming computer when he began playing at the age of five, leaving him with a machine that managed about 30 frames per second.
After repeatedly asking his parents for help buying a computer costing about $1,600, Conrod said his father agreed on the condition that he repay the money by working for his plumbing company during the summer. He ultimately covered the cost with two weeks of Fortnite earnings.
“If I never had that PC, if I never had access to that computer, this career — this setup that you see — would not be a thing,” Conrod said from his bedroom in Dallas, where he streams for thousands of viewers.
He left school in eighth grade after earning nearly $200,000 through the Fortnite World Cup at the age of 14. Conrod said the demands of attending middle school from early morning before competing in evening tournaments had left him exhausted, and that he could not perform at his best while tired.
His decision came after discussions with his parents, who eventually agreed that he could commit fully to competitive gaming. Conrod said children should still maintain good grades, describing his own decision to leave school as “still delusional but a little less delusional” because he had already won a substantial amount of money.
Mr van Dreunen said esports remained “very hard to make a living” from, with most of the money concentrated among the leading players and no “healthy” talent ecosystem. Conrod also said competitive gaming continued to face scepticism from people who did not regard it as a legitimate career.
The fund has already received an early example of the opportunity Conrod hopes to provide. At the first Clixmas, two years ago, a player known as Joshreyli won a one-on-one challenge against him and received a computer. Conrod said Joshreyli had since earned six figures as a professional gamer.
Conrod’s team finished fourth among 50 duos at the Fortnite Global Championship in Belgium last weekend, winning $120,000. “It’s like a full-circle moment of what helps me want to do more stuff like this,” he said. “Those stories fire me up.”
