UFC bantamweight prospect Sean O’Malley might be out of the Octagon for the foreseeable future, but the 24-year-old talent is still making a decent income.
Speaking to Luke Thomas on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour, ‘Sugar’ claimed to be making ‘around $4,5000 a month’ through streaming video games on Twitch.tv.
“Right now I’m making around $4,500 a month through gaming,” O’Malley said, per MMA Fighting’s Shaun Al-Shatti. “I just do it because I love it. I’ve been playing video games since I was a little kid, and I’ve had a couple people say, ‘Why don’t you stream? Why don’t you stream?’ I was like, ‘No one wants to watch me play.’ And I’ve been streaming for like nine months now and there’s some loyal fans in there.”
O’Malley, who also scored a professional sponsorship deal with eSports team OpTic Gaming, mainly streams the video game Fortnite to around 50/60 viewers per stream. The fan favorite sometimes streams for up to eight hours a day, which is around the average ‘shift’ for a full-time gamer.
“I only get 50, 60 viewers at a time, so if fans have questions, they come in there, and there’s some kids there that literally every time I go live, they get a notification on their phone and they’re in there talking, saying, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ I have a good relationship with my subscribers. They come in there, subscribe, and I’m in the UFC video game now so I was playing that a couple times. I’ve seen some people on Twitter like, ‘Why would we pay to play with you?’ It’s not like that. It’s something I do — it’s not just fun, it’s work too. I put a lot of hours into that to try to build that channel, so it’s work really at the end of the day.”
O’Malley was recently suspended for six months by the Nevada State Athletic Commission for his use of performance-enhancing drugs. The Arizona-based fighter tested positive for ostarine but claims to have accidentally ingested a tainted supplement.
The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) could also suspend O’Malley for up to two years.
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