{"id":217735,"date":"2025-12-06T01:07:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T01:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/217735\/"},"modified":"2025-12-06T01:07:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T01:07:14","slug":"i-play-video-games-on-youtube-and-now-i-own-a-house-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/217735\/","title":{"rendered":"I play video games on YouTube and now I own a house \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an irony in what I do<\/a> because I\u2019m quite an introverted person. Even going back to when I was a kid, I was the quietest person in my family. I just wouldn\u2019t talk much. Even in school I wouldn\u2019t talk much. And now, here I am in an online field where all I do is talk. <\/p>\n

It all went wrong when my mum got me a copy of Pok\u00e9mon for Game Boy<\/a> Colour and I\u2019ve never been the same since. I was four or five and she brought it back from Canada<\/a>, and I remember being so excited. It felt like a second Christmas. She had one for me and my brother.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been 25-odd years since then; she probably regrets that decision. There\u2019s a lot of other stuff I could have gone on to be and here I am \u2013 I play video games on the internet. I live stream myself playing the games and just have a bit of craic with it all.<\/p>\n

I stream everything I do. On average I work around 40 hours a between editing for YouTube and being live on Twitch. It can push well above that some weeks. I go live four or five times a week; usually I stream for six or eight hours. I just really enjoy it. I always have.<\/p>\n

Playing games would have strictly been a hobby until 2011. I was 16. I was supposed to be doing my homework after school, but I was like, \u201cnah, I want to play games like Minecraft and Pok\u00e9mon\u201d. My parents were so frustrated with me. I think it\u2019s understandable at that age. I decided to pick this up as a hobby when I was supposed to be doing my Leaving Cert. We joke about it now.<\/p>\n

When I started, I played games with my friends. I did that because I would have been too shy to do it by myself. I would have thought in my head: \u201cI\u2019ve got nothing worthwhile to say by myself, so let\u2019s just have some fun\u201d. I really loved it and watched a lot of other creators online like Kevin, Jerma and Yogscast, which motivated me. I just find there\u2019s an authenticity to it. A kind of humour that comes from the back-and-forth. It\u2019s almost like an interactive kind of theatre. You\u2019re watching a TV, but the TV screen can yell back at you. There\u2019s something really compelling in that. <\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until 2018 that it took off. I was living in Japan at the time. Everything started to get 10 or 20 times more views than it normally would before. I went from 100,000 followers on YouTube, to a million that year. I was gearing up to teach English as a foreign language over there, but I ended up skipping that because YouTube did so well. I just got very lucky since then. I\u2019ve been blessed with a lovely community; they\u2019re a really good bunch. I know it can be rough in the online field and there are all sorts of crowds, but I\u2019ve been blessed with a very good one.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The S\u00e9ance of Blake Manor: Irish-made game getting rave reviews has Irishness in its DNAOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

I love Irish literature. I studied Joyce and Beckett in college. I\u2019ve always loved books and always loved to read. I get that from my dad. He introduced me to Dubliners by James Joyce, when I was 12, and I really became interested in Joyce and have read a bunch of biographies about his life.<\/p>\n

In his time, he would have been grappling with a lot of new technology and that had an influence on me. He tried to give new formats a chance. He opened the first cinema in Ireland way back in the day. He believed in travelling but was still haunted by Ireland. For myself, I tried living abroad just to try to get some of that outside perspective because, you know, we have got to go see the world when we can.<\/p>\n

I moved to Japan because I simply had the chance and I didn\u2019t have a good reason to say no. For me, it was: \u201clet\u2019s try to just have that sense of adventure, so I\u2019m not just stuck in Ireland forever\u201d, as much as I love it here. We need to get out and about and see the world.<\/p>\n

Being Irish I love being able to describe some of the weird oddities that we have here to a broad and foreign audience. The amount of times I have to describe what a spice bag is or what is a chicken fillet roll is, it\u2019s very fun. Sometimes I get to speak a bit of Gaeilge.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Irish YouTuber Jacksepticeye among platform’s highest-earning gamersOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

I was able to buy a house recently, shockingly, in this economy and I\u2019m very thankful for that. To be honest I didn\u2019t expect to be able to live in Ireland at all, just because of how things are here. I have a lot of friends who moved over recently to Zurich in Switzerland, because it\u2019s cheaper. Which is very telling.<\/p>\n

I still have to remind myself that what I do is a real thing. Just working on an online sphere people are disembodied, so we\u2019re just text messages in a chat box ultimately. Whenever I show up at a convention and real people are lining up to meet me I think, \u201cOh my God, what is this? What are you doing here?\u201d<\/p>\n

For me, in a lot of ways, this is still the after-school hobby. And I think that\u2019s how I always will treat it. It will never really feel like I work when I do this. I think that comes across even in my content. I am just having silly fun at the end of the day. <\/p>\n

In conversation with Fiona Ellis. This interview is part of a series about well-known people\u2019s lives and relationship with Ireland. Follow Daniel RTGame at youtube.com\/rtgame<\/a> and twitch.tv\/rtgame<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s an irony in what I do because I\u2019m quite an introverted person. Even going back to when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,18,2215,19,17,361,14232,121],"class_list":{"0":"post-217735","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-for-you","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-magazine","14":"tag-me-myself-and-ireland","15":"tag-youtube"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115669948474637814","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}