Man who spends 12 hours day playing Fortnite makes £400,000 from his hobby

The best footballers earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, the best F1 drivers make millions a month, but how much can you be paid for playing video games?

Well, Tyler "Ninja" Blevins is quite possibly the best Fortnite player on the planet - and he makes £400,000 a month from Twich subscriptions alone.

That's before we get to donations, endorsements, YouTube and more - he even got Red Bull to help build a professional gamer studio in his basement.

But he warns it's not something you can just walk into.

"You can't just drop everything and focus on playing video games for a living," he said in an CNBC interview.

"You want to make sure you're securing your future and putting in the extra time to make this happen as well."

Nija's become so famous he's even been asked on the Jimmy Fallon show (NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

He pointed out when he started he was also working as well as going to college.

In fact, he still has a lot of time for his old job at Noodles and Co, happily tweeting them praise long after his meteoric rise to fame.

And his rise has been meteoric.

Just two years ago he was one of thousands of 20-somethings streaming video games on Twitch — with 28,000 subscribers — and making videos on YouTube.

Since then Ninja has become the first professional video game player to be featured on the cover of ESPN the Magazine, appeared on TV shows like The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and ESPN's E:60 - he even helped drop the ball in Times Square on New Year's Eve.

In the gaming world he was the first streamer on Twitch to reach 10 million followers - 160,000 of them paying to go ad-free - and that's before we get to his 22 million YouTube followers and 4.9 million Twitter followers.

His cause has been helped by the success of Fortnite - a free game with more than 200 million players - and that has seen him team up with celebs and fellow players including Drake and Travis Scott.

It's fair to say he works for it though, spending 12 hours a day playing Fortnite from his studio - all the while interacting with his audience and welcoming new subscribers.

But the audience he created there has let him make even more in more traditional ways - Nija now has partnerships with a companies such as Red Bull, Uber Eats, and NZXT.

Now, like a footballer getting paid to transfer to a new team, he's signed with Mixer.

It's fair to say it worked, within five days Ninja became the first streamer on the platform to earn one million subscribers.