The Hunger For Games

When Mithilesh Patankar, aka Mythpat, 24, and Ujjwal Chaurasia aka Techno Gamerz, 20, sit at their computers and play games for an audience, they earn twice as much as engineers do

- Karishma Kuenzang

One day, swears Mithilesh Patankar, he's going to laze on a beach and play video games all day.

This sounds like a fine retirement plan, but the 24-year-old Mumbai-based gaming content creator, who goes by the handle Mythpat, still has a way to go. On YouTube for three years now, the winner of the YouTube Streamy Award 2021 for International Creator of the Year may be making a better living than most engineers, but he's too young to retire. Not to mention too full of ideas that need expression.

Delhi-NCR-based 20-year-old Ujjwal Chaurasia, aka Techno Gamerz, has no dreams of retirement either. He's too excited about the gaming content he creates. He makes about the same kind of money as Mithilesh, and his future plans now include app development.

When I mentioned our cover stars, my millennilal bestie whipped out his phone and pulled up videos of Mithilesh and Ujjwal that he loves, perhaps a testament to how wellknown the two are. In fact, gaming is now recognised as a legitimate sport, and the next edition of the Commonwealth Games, and the 2022 Asian Games, will include eSports (professional gaming) as a category. In India alone, revenues from the game streaming industry could touch around $300-400 million by 2023, according to industry experts.

Mithilesh was in the second grade when he first discovered games like Mario and Roadcrash. Ujjwal started even earlier at age five when he came across the game Snake on his older brother's phone. Games were a major part of both their lives and when social media gave them the opportunity to play all day and earn from it, naturally they jumped right in.