A Soulja Boy esports venture is in the works according to the man himself – he’s seeking to enter the rough world of professional video game competition sometime in 2019.
Soulja Boy is an American rapper who recently launched a pair of gaming consoles in early December. He followed that announcement with another two machines, making for a total of two handheld systems and two home consoles. Now a Soulja Boy esports project is in the beginning stages and the rapper is entertaining the idea of hiring famed Fortnite streamer Ninja.
“Shoutout my boy Ninja, man, he’s a good friend of mine,” Soulja Boy told TMZ in a recent on-the-spot interview. “He actually taught me a lot about streaming. He got me verified on Twitch. He helped me with my streams, so. Big shout out to Ninja.”
The Chicago-born rapper has stated that he’s looking to form teams for several games in the early stages of 2019. At the moment, his focus seems to be on forming teams for Fortnite, Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The man seems to know his stuff and that isn’t a big surprise – he often streams his Fortnite matches on his Twitch channel. He stated in the interview that he owns a custom-built NZXT desktop PC that cost him a cool $15,000.
The potential for forming teams for Fortnite, CS:GO, and Call of Duty is certainly doable for the Soulja Boy esports venture. Each of these games has leagues that are relatively open to newcomers and it wouldn’t necessarily take a massive amount of capital investment to get things going. However, Overwatch’s biggest esports league is run by Blizzard Entertainment themselves and they have a heck of a buy-in. Reportedly, it can cost anywhere from $20-60 million to get started in the Overwatch League– and that’s just the franchise fee. Tournaments outside of the official league do exist, but they certainly can’t pull in the same numbers as Blizzard’s own esports efforts.
The Soulja Boy esports teams will hopefully be hiring talent in the beginning parts of 2019. No specific names were dropped save for one – Soulja Boy stated that “it’s gonna be a lot to hire Ninja to play for me”, though it’s uncertain just how serious he was about hiring the world’s most popular Fortnite streamer. We’ll just have to wait and see how this whole thing is going to turn out.
