The Merthyr teen who makes thousands of pounds staying up most of the night playing video games

Kyle Mayers was just 12 years old when his dad Tim realised he was “better than the average gamer” as he would regularly beat everyone he played in whatever video game he turned his hand to.

Now Tim says Kyle doesn’t get up until around 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

But it’s not because he’s lazy, it’s due to the fact he is often up all night playing games. The difference between him and most other people staying up far too late doing the same thing, is that Kyle is earning serious money doing it.

Read more: Cwmbran teen makes thousands selling vintage charity shop clothes through Depop

Kyle, now aged 18, switched to gaming on Facebook last August and has since garnered thousands of followers online – and his exploits have already earned him around £20,000 in less than a year. An avid gamer, Kyle, from Trelewis in Merthyr Tydfil, was even offered a partnership contract with the social media company after just three months, becoming Wales’ first Facebook gaming partner.

Playing under the name HUSKY, he now rakes in thousands of pounds in subscriptions and donations from people watching him play every night, challenging him or asking for tips and help. It turns out – he’s one of many obsessed gamers out there – this woman has an £8,000 robotic arm inspired by the video game Metal Gear Solid.

It’s a far cry from when he left college last year and struggled to find a job during lockdown. He decided to take the plunge into Facebook streaming – sold his XBox and phone, pooled some money together to buy a basic PC and started playing the football video game Rocket League.

Before long, he found a lot of people were logging on to watch him play.

“It was so weird – it was small at first and nobody really [watched]… there were maybe 30 viewers. Then it was 150 somehow, and eventually one day there were like 2,200 people watching,” Kyle said. “I was like ‘what’s going on?'”

Logging on at around 7pm every night, Kyle has racked up nearly 16,000 followers since August and earns around $1,500 per month – just over £1,000 – in subscription fees, plus considerable donations from people who want to support him.

“With a Facebook partnership, somebody can come into the channel and buy hundreds of subscriptions for all the viewers in the chat. So that makes him quite a solid revenue every month,” Kyle’s father Tim explained.

“Donations vary – in one night he made £1,100 in two hours, the next night he could only make £50. But the big nights outrun the quieter ones. It tends to be Sundays or the end of the month when people get paid, but it can be very random. You can have a random supporter come in and decide to drop $150 out of the blue.”

Kyle said his success had been “crazy” and that he “didn’t expect to be making so much money” just from playing video games, something his parents said had also been a “shock.”

“I’ve always been more quiet and not really talkative I guess, so [when I started] it was first to just play and talk to the people I already knew on there,” said Kyle. “I was just going on to play games and talk to them. I didn’t know it would be hundreds of people [watching].

“I started playing Red Dead Redemption, then moved into Black Ops 2, Call of Duty, FIFA. When Rocket League first came out I think six years ago it was just something I played and messed around with, you know. I didn’t really take it too seriously. But three years ago then I went back into it and started to actually try to get good at the game, and it just went from there. But it’s been crazy hours every day.”

Totting up over 6,000 hours on the game since he started streaming, Kyle normally streams for about three hours a day on Facebook and also spends “maybe six hours a day” playing other games.

“Some days you do longer than three hours. It depends on how it goes. Some days are slower, other days are crazy and everyone’s going wild,” he said, adding that he could sometimes play until 4 o’clock in the morning.

Kyle’s dad Tim said he normally woke his son up “about four or five o’clock” in the afternoon, laughing that he’s “shocked to see daylight” after getting up earlier than normal for our interview.

Tim said Kyle was “a bit lost” with where to take his career during lockdown and that video games had provided an unexpected path into making money and even helping other people who treated him as a role model online, as well as forging close friendships with people there.

“He just sort of blew up. It was a shock to all the family and him. Because he’s only 18 and sits playing games, the magnitude of what has happened [hasn’t hit him].

“It’s shown that online gaming is the future and there is a way to make money. He’s quite shy but he turns into a different person when he’s gaming. He comes alive, he’s electric. He’s got such a tight community – he gets so many comments from people about how happy-go-lucky he is and how much he helps their mental health [by doing it]. He makes people smile every day doing what he does.

“We would never have thought he could make money doing what he’s doing, but he’s proved us wrong.”

Kyle’s revenue stream is such that he can sometimes give up to £1,000 away to smaller streamers on the platform to help their progress, and he’s not been shy in treating his parents either.

“He’s currently paying for his mother to do the garden out,” said Tim, who helps Kyle out with the business side of things. He bought me a £1,000 PC for Christmas. He really looks after us, we’re so proud of him, we are.”

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Kyle has also put much of his earnings from gaming back into streaming, spending it on advertising and on upgrading his hardware. He raised £1,100 in six hours for UK mental health charity YoungMinds earlier this year, much of which was donated by foreign fans of his.

“He’s pretty much got fans in every corner of the world,” Tim said. “We had one in from South Africa the other night. He’s really popular in North America, and in South America he’s like a God, in Mexico and places like that.”

With gaming now a full-time business, Kyle has set his sights on being able to travel more when the pandemic allows it and growing his fanbase. Tim added that he hoped to be “the biggest gaming streamer in the UK in the next five years.”

“A lot of the guys in America even offered me to come to their houses, for me to travel over there. I think getting 100,000 followers on Facebook would be the next thing,” added Kyle, who also has 60,000 followers on TikTok.