‘Minecraft’ Player Buys $4.5 Million Hollywood Home Thanks To YouTube Earnings
The old parental admonition that you won’t make money, or do anything with your life playing video games is becoming harder and harder to believe. Variety reports popular YouTube personality Jordan “CaptainSparklez” Maron just purchase a $4.5 million home in Hollywood, not far from Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson.
Maron primarily streams Minecraft on his YouTube channel that is quickly approaching 9 million subscribers, but will do other games from time to time such as Trials Fusion, Goat Simulator, and Grand Theft Auto V. His channel also hosts various Minecraft music videos and parodies.
In addition to the YouTube channel, he also hosts a Twitch stream with over 1.2 million followers. However, he does not stream as much there so most of his activity and his income comes through the YouTube channel.
In just over five years, Maron has racked up over 1.9 billion views. That would certainly explain how is able to afford a swanky artistic $4.5 million home on top of a hill in Hollywood.
According to Variety, the home has 4,100 square feet with three bedrooms, five bathrooms, glass-railed terraces on all three floors with views that extend to the Pacific Ocean. A living and dining room are on the uppermost floor along with the master bedroom that opens to a terrace with an outdoor fireplace.
A family room is situated on the bottom level accompanied by a sunken wet bar, a terrace with a stainless steel barbecue, party-sized spa, and an infinity swimming pool.
This makes the second Minecraft personality that has purchased a Hollywood home. Of course Maron’s place is decidedly more intimate than Markus Persson’s $70 million mansion with vodka and tequila bars, a 90-inch high definition television, and a candy room with a massive candy dispensary.
The Minecraft creator was already rich thanks to the stunning success and popularity of the game. However, he reached new levels of wealth once Microsoft purchased Minecraft and Mojang from him for a cool $2.5 billion.
The high life hasn’t necessarily been fulfilling for Persson since then. The game developer took to Twitter this past August to lament the loss of motivation after getting everything he could want, the lack of real friends, and the difficulty of finding a girl.
Will CaptainSparklez suffer the same fate? It seems unlikely simply because of the personality difference between the two. Persson is notoriously introverted in private, as the Thomas Amroth book A Year with Minecraft: Behind the Scenes at Mojang detailed. Persson also struggled with game development, having turned the Minecraft development duties over to Jens Bergensten and the rest of Mojang in late 2011. His attempt at follow-up games ended in mental blocks and cancellations.
Meanwhile, Maron comes across as an extrovert and is still streaming Minecraft and other games at a prodigious pace of two to three videos a day with other members of his production team. He has even made videos about his new home and shared them to his channel. He hasn’t yet shown off the infinity swimming pool or sunken wet bar, but he has shared his “production room,” where streams are created, along with his garage and some of his yard issues as well.
CaptainSparlez is just one of many who have made a successful living out of being a YouTube personality with a game focus. PewDiePie, 25-year old Felix Kjellberg, is the current reigning king of gaming video makers with more than $7.5 million earned last year alone from ad revenue. The industry has grown so much in such a short time that Amazon purchased Twitch, while YouTube recently started a dedicated game streaming service.
Turns out playing video games can be pretty profitable after all.
[Images via Nicholson Property Group; h/t PC Gamer]
