You can definitely get paid to play Call of Duty, regardless of which game in the franchise you’re playing. Here we’re going to go through how to play COD for money in a number of ways. Some are more lucrative than others, but we’ll explain the work and rewards as we go.
How to Play COD for Money
- Tournament & Challenges for Cold Hard Cash
- Fiverr
- YouTube
- Streaming
- Become a Pro
- Start a Wix Blog
- Podcast
- Other Types of Content Creation
Tournament & Challenges for Cold Hard Cash
The easiest method for earning money by playing COD is to head to Checkmate Gaming. This is a website that hosts a number of tournaments around the world, each and every day. If you’re good, you can earn a lot here, but even if you’re not, there’s money to be made.
You need to sign up in order to use the site, but once you have, you’ll find several options available. More games can be played here than just COD, but we’ll stick to that for now.
This is a fantastic website to get stuck in earning money from playing COD. It’s also a great starting point for doing much more.
Free and Paid Tournaments
With Checkmate Gaming there are tournaments that are free to enter, or cost credits. You’re able to earn credits by winning free tournaments, or buying them from the website.
If you’re not sure about how well you’ll do against other players, opt for the free tournaments first. These sometimes award a small amount of cash for the player who comes first. However, the real point of them is to help you get ready for the larger tournaments.
With some paid tournaments, you can earn around $150-$250, if you come first. Sometimes there will be other smaller prizes, but these are the top prizes you can win.
By taking a look at the various tournaments on offer, you could find yourself earning $150 per day. Even if you don’t, you can use Checkmate Gaming as a method for earning money in other ways.
Fiverr
We’ve covered Fiverr in other articles before. It’s a fantastic resource for earning money from playing games.
Firstly, you could offer to coach other players in COD. There are so many things you could coach people in, from mastering a particular game mode to just providing support in Warzone.
Something that a lot of people seem to be looking for is YouTube banners and video artwork. If you’re able to put together a large batch of Call of Duty related images, you could offer to make YouTube video icons for those making videos.
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic forcing more people to stay at home, a lot of players are looking for others to play with them. Sometimes all they want is a little company. By charging to play with someone else, you can get more experience playing while you earn a little cash on the side.
YouTube
If making banners for other people’s YouTube channels isn’t for you, then why not make the videos yourself? There’s a massive market for Call of Duty news or unique videos looking at the latest game. You could create daily or weekly videos for YouTube and watch your community grow.
When it comes to how to play COD for money, though, this isn’t the fastest method. You need to get a lot of views before you earn any money, racking up 10,000 hours watched. If you’re producing good quality daily videos, this could happen very quickly.
On the other hand, there are way more YouTube channels out there doing the same thing than there are creating new and interesting content. You’re best off using this as a backup method for earning money. Over time you may well build up an audience, but if you don’t count on it as an immediate return, then you could be surprised with what you eventually earn.
Stream
Streaming COD is the much more lucrative way of earning money from playing the games. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has close to 1 million concurrent viewers on Twitch alone. That’s a lot of people looking to watch someone play the game.
This does mean that you’ll be competing with a lot of other streamers for views, though. Generally, only those who can differentiate themselves from the hoards of streamers already on the platforms can earn money. If you create something interesting for people to watch, though, you could see the cash rolling in sooner than you think.
Dedication is another vital part of streaming, regardless of the platform. If you’re not dedicated to streaming on a regular schedule, people won’t be able to keep up with the content you’re making. The most successful streamers have a schedule every week, and they stick to it religiously.
Take all of this into account if you want to stream COD to earn money. It’s another path that requires a lot of effort and may never pay off. It does work in tandem with YouTube, though. Every stream could be cut up into multiple videos. Every game you play could be the background for a news video. Keep all this in mind, and you never know how much you could make.
Here’s some of the best streaming equipment to get you started.
Become a Pro
Call of Duty has a buzzing professional community. There are tournaments for individual players and teams as well. All of these can earn you money, as long as you’re good enough to make it to a high enough level.
Prizes range from $100,000 all the way up to $1,500,000. There is a very competitive scene for these tournaments though. Usually teams are good enough that they get paid to play the game all day as practice.
In order to make it as a pro, you’ll probably need to be streaming the game on a regular basis, raising your profile. It also wouldn’t hurt to become known as someone who is always talking about Call of Duty. If you push yourself enough, you should be able to make it as a pro, even at the lowest levels of a tournament.
Who knows? Maybe you’ll earn the bottom prize this year, and come back and take the biggest prize in 2021.
Start a Wix Blog
There’s a big market for online Call of Duty content, and Wix is one of the easiest places to make a start. The company allows you to set up a website for free, then upgrade it to a paid one without ads when you’re ready.
The benefit of using a platform like Wix is that you don’t need to do any coding to make your website work. You can pick a design with their incredibly useful tools, and get writing as soon as possible.
There are several reasons to start a Call of Duty blog, but the most obvious is making money. Ad revenue from Google Ads on your site will earn you cash for every view and clock. You could even start earning money from video ads that are shown on the site, but to even begin doing that, you need an audience.
Building an Audience
A Call of Duty blog will probably get traffic just because of how popular the franchise is. As long as you’re writing about all of the latest Call of Duty news, and anything else that seems newsworthy, you’ll see some people come to your site.
The secret to making a website stand out through is picking a unique angle to take. Yes, the news is important and will form the base of your blog. But you should really look for a niche to fill in the Call of Duty world.
Maybe you could do written analysis pieces of every map in Call of Duty history. You could cover all the facts about the map, how they were changed by Activision when exploits were found, and anything else you come across.
Story synopses of each COD game would also be very useful. A video is great for getting the most from a game’s story, but when that’s not possible, an article is the next best thing.
Learn About SEO
As you write more and more about Call of Duty, you’ll need to learn about SEO. This is the system Google uses to track which pages appear at the top of their results page. If you learn more about how SEO works, you could start to see new topics as you play COD. That’s exactly how to play COD for money if tournaments don’t work that is.
If you’re learning more about SEO, you could then offer your services to others. The Call of Duty scene is competitive wherever you look, including on blogs. If you can help a website stand out, then someone should be willing to pay you for that service.
Podcast
This penultimate method is another one that requires you to identify a Call of Duty niche and fill it. Podcasts are only becoming more and more popular with every year that goes by. The problem is, some of them will now overlap as a result.
Sometimes a personality can sell a podcast, but the best ones have a topic that no one else is talking about. With Call of Duty being the mammoth of a series that it is, there’s definitely something out there that you could cover.
As you play Call of Duty, regardless of which game, keep an eye out for interesting things you see. Talking about these could be a good point to start a podcast on. Once again, you could discuss the franchise’s maps or even each game as a whole.
There’s such a rich history to the Call of Duty franchise at this point that it’s hard to believe that a COD history podcast wouldn’t be a must-listen.
Other Content Creation
Creating content can always earn you money. You just need to find the right subject to make content on. There are Twitter and Instagram accounts that do nothing more than post gameplay, yet they manage to earn money with sponsored posts.
This is another area in which a unique view will go a long way. Think about the Twitter account that looks at Destiny 2 usernames as an example.
This account has almost 29,000 follows. On the surface, what it does is incredibly dull. It posts pictures of users in Destiny 2 where you can see their usernames. Why is this account getting so much attention? Because there are so many stupid usernames out there.
Players are unwittingly creating this content for the Twitter account. In the beginning, it was easy, because Destiny 2’s PC release saw a slew of stupid usernames suddenly join the game. You can also change that username on PC, which further increased the number of funny ones. Now players submit their usernames to the account for consideration, while before, this subject wasn’t even interesting.
Use it With Call of Duty
There are easily enough players in Call of Duty: Warzone to make a very similar account. However, you don’t need to outright copy them. Instead, you could start by posting your bad or silly attempts at playing.
For example, you could try to win a game in Warzone without killing anyone. Posting clips of you dying as you do could start a journey of clips that will end with you finally winning a match without killing a single player. It has to happen sometimes, right?
Take that concept, and see what else you can create content with. Call of Duty is a massive franchise, one that has millions of players. It’s never going to stop unless something catastrophic happens to Activision. Therefore all of these methods for earning money will be viable for many years to come.
Conclusion
Looking through all of these options, we can only recommend that someone who is dedicated to earning money from COD even start to try to do it. Each one of these methods can play into one another.
For example, you could play tournaments for money, and stream or record the gameplay. This could be used in videos, or on a Twitter or Instagram account, and you could also write about them.
This is the key as to how to play COD for money. As with all games, it’s not really about one simple method for earning money. The people who do so are working tirelessly for most hours of the day. They are always thinking about what they can use for their next post on Twitter, their next video, and ultimately the next big thing that will make them some cash.
If you don’t have this same attitude, then you’re going to find it very hard to make a living from playing COD. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t play COD for money and still have a life outside of it.
You may only want to earn a few dollars from playing tournaments. You might also just want to start a blog as a portfolio for applying for jobs. These are still very worthy reasons for trying to earn money from COD, but having that other primary goal will keep you from getting too disheartened if you don’t make it to earning hundreds or thousands of dollars.
This list is far from comprehensive, but it does cover some really great ways of earning money from COD. Our best advice is to look at the methods, and choose which ones would suit you best.
If you want to write, then start a blog. Want to make artwork? Offer to do Twitch and YouTube banners, it’s a very lucrative area for working. If all you want to do is play the game, then give Checkmate Gaming a go, it’s not going to cost you anything to try a few free tournaments.
Ultimately you need to decide what’s best for you. If you want to really make a legitimate attempt at playing COD for a living though, you probably need to be doing everything on this list as a minimum. When they all come together, you’ll start earning something, but unless you’ve got the dedication that people like Ninja do, you’re not going to make it.
