Quitting Jerry Banfield Gaming for the Third Time
My friends, I'm quitting Jerry Banfield gaming for the third time today. I want to explain to you why I'm doing that, and I want to share a little bit of history, because I hope this is helpful if you have dreams of being a Twitch streamer, a gamer, a YouTube gamer, or a content creator online. I've got a long history of experience with this that will be useful for you. On the main Jerry Banfield channel I'm also uploading my videos from all my channels to my podcast, which is called the Jerry Banfield Show. It's on iTunes, Spotify, and most other places you'd listen to podcasts.
I'm quitting gaming again because, as I've seen before, gaming for me really needs to be something that I'm either all in on or that I let go of completely. Clearly, casual gaming does not work for me. I've tested every different way to be a gaming creator, and here are the main lessons I've learned.
One: gaming just takes a lot of time. You need to make videos. You need to do live streams. And I would say that if you actually want any income out of doing your gaming, you have to have at least five hours a day, seven days a week. If you don't care about having income out of your gaming — and this is where you need to be honest with yourself — if you really don't care and never need to have any income out of your gaming, then sure, do whatever you want. Upload a video, play for fun, it doesn't matter. But if you actually want to have income out of your gaming, it is a serious grind, and ideally you might want to have more like six or eight hours a day available if you want a real income out of it. What I've noticed is that it can be fun just to play games, or even to stream for fun, but a lot of the time it's not that fun to do it for money.
A Long History of Quitting and Coming Back
The last two times I quit gaming: I quit in 2016 because it wasn't fun anymore. I was getting lots of views, but I had to play League of Legends or Call of Duty — mostly League of Legends. If I played League of Legends, people watched. They watched me get my butt beat over and over again, and it wasn't fun at all. There was no money at the time, although there were lots of views, and it certainly would have turned into good money eventually. But I just got sick of doing it and feeling like I was wasting my time.
Then in 2018, after a year and a half, I came back to gaming again, because I still had this idea that I could be a full-time gamer. I had just blown up the rest of my business, so I didn't really know what to do. After a year playing a whole bunch of Call of Duty Black Ops 4 and Blackout — on Facebook Gaming especially, but on YouTube and Twitch as well — I tried every different formula again. There was almost no income in it, it took a ton of time, and I had stopped having fun, so I quit gaming again.
Then I came back another year later, and I was actually able to accomplish all the dreams I'd had for gaming. I became very popular on Facebook Gaming, had millions and millions of views in 2021, blew my page up, and made over a hundred thousand in a single year of profit playing games on Facebook. I really achieved my dream. And yet I found that I didn't really like it that much, because it was still constantly a grind. I had to constantly be playing video games for hours every day. While that might sound like fun to you, it stops being fun playing video games once it's a job — once you have to perform and either grind out a single game or find some formula that people will keep watching. I got really sick of playing Warzone in 2021 for three or four hours a day, every day. Sure, it's fun to play some Warzone, play some games, but having to grind it out and feeling like you're going to work just made me not want to play games at all.
Then I got demonetized on Facebook in 2022, and I've been trying to figure out where gaming fits in my business ever since. I told you all I wouldn't quit gaming again after quitting two other times, and some of you, like Brandon and Nick, had stuck around through all those iterations. I've just recently gotten my Twitch channel into a place where, in terms of viewership, it's going great. I have an average of 70 people watching me play Gods Unchained on Twitch, which is awesome, and hundreds of thousands of minutes watched. But if I don't play Gods Unchained, almost nobody watches. And even with people watching me play Gods Unchained, there's not much income — less than 200 from 70 hours of streaming. The income is not that big of a deal to me. The time is a big deal to me.
Stretching Myself Too Thin
What I've been doing lately is putting these crypto videos up and then gaming, essentially using my YouTube videos on crypto to fund my time gaming. But I've been stretching myself too thin. I'm not sitting at home living with my parents with nothing else to do. I've got a wife and kids, and my wife has a full-time job and a side hustle. Being a stay-at-home dad is a significant part of what I do. Me taking so much time to stream and play games has been putting strain on my wife to do more around the house and to take care of the kids more, and she's not been happy with that. And yet she's been nice about it. She said she wished I was more present, and she'd like me to be more present. Because in order to do crypto videos and gaming live streams, I've been constantly, all day, on some device — learning how to play Gods Unchained better and watching all these crypto videos to get information to put out. Then I've been cranking videos out on my other channels too. I'm very passionate about my business videos and my recovery videos as well, and I haven't been making time for those.
Now, a lot of you say, well, why don't you just play Gods Unchained for a few hours a week on Twitch? Why don't you cut back from an average of two and a half hours a day to maybe five hours a week? A few things. I don't enjoy casual gaming. It's not fun to me to show up on Twitch and play a game that I don't play every day, and then suck at it and have a bunch of people watching. That's not enjoyable. It's also not enjoyable to have to play one game or nobody watches, because some days I'd like to play things besides Gods Unchained. Just like on Facebook, I tried playing things besides Warzone and just got punished by the algorithm for doing that, which really pissed me off and led me to getting sick of gaming altogether — and it's the same thing on Twitch.
Gods Unchained is also a big money pit. I don't like playing budget decks in Gods Unchained. It's not fun to just grind it out with some $20 deck for a couple of hours a week doing my play-to-earn games, then show up on Twitch, get wrecked, and not have any fun.
Choosing a Balanced Life
So it's about choosing what's most important to me. What's most important to me is that I have a balanced life. I don't want to be spending five or six hours a day, seven days a week, in this office here doing videos and live streams, burning myself out. I'm also going to AA meetings, and I'm not cutting those, because then things could really go down the drain. I do yoga and take care of my body — I'm not going to cut that. I get eight or nine hours of sleep a night — I'm not going to cut that. And I have hours a day with my family, which I've been skimping on and paying the price for in one way or another.
I had a nice cry finally, just sitting down with my son yesterday, because it had been a while — I don't even know how long. But it had been a while since I just sat down with my son and watched him play, because I've constantly been busy. If I'm in the house, I'm always working. I don't just sit around. I'm doing something and working almost all day. And it's got to stop.
So I've tested every different way I can do the gaming. I've tried doing it casually, just playing an hour or two — actually an hour, every other day — and that's no fun, because hardly anybody wants to come watch me play a game two or three days a week on an inconsistent schedule on a game that's not competitive. It's pretty much just me and Lisa hanging out. And I wonder, is that really the best thing? If I don't stream, maybe you all will find something better to do. I want to be hanging out with real people as much as possible. And if I'm going to create videos in here, they need to be the best I've got to give. If I'm going to take time to work, I want it to be something that's rewarding financially as well.
What I love about doing my YouTube videos is that I can spend an hour to a day, seven days a week, on YouTube videos and easily earn enough money to pay all the bills. With gaming, I can't do that. I could just continue to play Gods Unchained and depend on my wife for income, but I've tried doing that, and I ended up hating it and resenting that I spend all this time and hardly get any money. So then I get my side hustle going, but then I hate that I'm imbalancing my life. The only logical thing is to cut the gaming completely — get rid of the games, get rid of the consoles, and just let go of it.
Letting Go, Maybe for the Final Time
I started playing games when I was little, just to amuse myself because I was bored, because I hardly had anything else to do as a kid. I played games a lot as an adult because I was lonely, and then playing games made me even more lonely. Now I've got a lot of people who want a lot of time with me — from my family, to my wife and kids, to my mom next door, to people at AA meetings who I almost never do anything with because I'm so busy with my stuff online. So it's time. Something's got to give.
The logical thing — the thing I've been putting the most time into that gives me the least back — is the gaming. It's been like that for quite a while. I've tried to get out of it one way or another, and then I've tried to get back into it, and it's time to let it go. So I'm letting the gaming go, for what perhaps might be the final time. If this is the moment you want to keep walking with me instead, the best way to do that today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where I'm putting my time and energy now. If you ever want to look back on this whole chapter, it's all there in my Games playlist.
I'm sorry to everybody I've disappointed in the Gods Unchained community by saying I wouldn't quit and that I'd stick with it till I die. Well, I redact that statement and modify it to: I'll see y'all later. Thanks a lot for your love and support on Jerry Banfield Gaming. I don't plan to have any more videos on this channel. Check out the Jerry Banfield Show podcast. And that's it. Checkout time.