Who to make money from League of Legends

In the gaming world there are two (obvious) types of players: players that put money into the game and players that get money out of the game. I'm assuming that you want to know about the latter.

I've stated in multiple responses that some professional players can make upwards of 7 figure salaries playing games like League of Legends or DotA2. See: What's Faker's annual salary? or How much more does Faker earn as a salary?. In general players only make a decent salary from attracting viewers to watch them and running advertisements or gaining sponsors. Sponsorship is very common in teams and players because they offer a lot more money than advertisements can. To give you an idea, Twitch pays approximately $2 per 1000 ad views, whereas a sponsorship can give you free gear and thousands of dollars (Source needed). Subscribing to a channel is where a decent portion of the money occurs. Streamers earn $2.50 per subscriber, with top streamers having thousands of subscribers. This in turn means that you can make a very good living off of streaming consistently.

However, this does not only apply to League of Legends streamers. The reason why most players tend to go toward League streaming is because the game itself is insanely popular, bringing tens of thousands of viewers for the best streamers (typically professional players). There are some, notably less, popular streamers that play games that you mentioned. For example, Chief Pat is probably the most popular Clash of Clans streamer who can get a couple thousand of viewers every time he broadcasts (ChiefPat). Or Circon, a World of Tanks streamer who has 33k followers, approximately half of Chief Pat's (Circon).

Here is where the discrepancy occurs though. Profitable games are those that areinteresting to watch and primarily multiplayer. These are the biggest reasons why there are no "Candy Crush" streams. They are not interesting to watch, and the game itself is not viewer interactive. People want to be involved. This is why when you see yourself on TV you immediately have that "5 seconds of fame" feeling. The same effect occurs in streaming. People want to subscribe to get their favorite professional player to give recognition, or they want to donate large amounts to get a reaction or possibly be ingrained in the "hall of large donations".

To more specifically answer your question, it's all about how much you monetize from the game versus how much you input into the game. Chief Pat would rather spend $5 on gems per hour to keep his viewers entertained and not waiting than queue everything up and wait for his units to complete. This way he can profit from his subscriber and advertisement revenue versus gem consumption. In reference to League of Legends, spending money is entirely optional, but similar to Clash of Clans, it speeds up the process of certain aspects of the game and opens up opportunities. A streamer may want to teach his viewers how to rank from Bronze to Challenger and thus spend RP to get all his desired champions and an IP boost to get his desired runes. Again we would calculate input versus output.

Hope that helps.