Play To Your Strengths

YouTube phenomenon Elliott Watkins – aka Muselk – has made a small fortune playing video games in his bedroom. Use his secrets to turn your passion into a payday.

- Ben Jhoty 

ELLIOTT WATKINS’ right forearm is tensed and his voice animated as he provides running commentary on the final frantic movements of a character called Roadhog in class-based shooter Overwatch.

As Roadhog meets an untimely demise, Watkins’ voice escalates in pitch before trailing off. He turns from the screen and smiles. Such good-humoured calamities characterise the YouTube videos that have made Watkins – or at least his online moniker “Muselk” – a household name among gamers from Sydney to Seoul.

With 1.9 million subscribers and around seven million views per week, Watkins’ YouTube figures are eyepopping but also typical of an industry that’s starting to leave traditional sports and entertainment in its tracks. Last year’s prize pool for e-Sports tournament DOTA 2, for example, was over US$20 million, larger than that for the Superbowl and the US Masters.

The thing about Watkins, though, is that’s he’s not even that good at Overwatch. What’s made the likeable 22-year-old old an online pin-up is his infectious enthusiasm for sharing the joys of gameplay and a sense of fun that can’t be faked. “He’s super charming and he knows how to talk to his audience,” says Nich Richardson, co-host of 7Mate’s new gaming show screenPLAY. “He makes you feel like you’re hanging out together.”

Comfortably dressed in what you might call his work attire, barefoot in jeans and a dress shirt, Watkins is both humble and astute about identifying the roots of his success. “The thing about YouTube is that people either watch you because you’re really good or because you’re really funny,” says Watkins, as he chats to MH from the lounge room of his inner Sydney apartment. “I’m hopefully somewhere in the middle.”