Ninja (gamer)

Esports and streaming

Blevins began playing Halo 3 professionally in 2009.^[7] He played for various organizations including Cloud9, Renegades, Team Liquid,^[8] and most recently, Luminosity Gaming.^[9] Blevins became a streamer in 2011.^[5] He began playing H1Z1, then moved to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. He joined Luminosity Gaming in 2017 first as a Halo player, then to H1Z1, later moving to PUBG, where he won the PUBG Gamescom Invitational Squads classification in August 2017.^[10]

Blevins began streaming the newly released Fortnite Battle Royale shortly after the PUBG Gamescom Invitational. His viewership began to grow, which coincided with the game's growth in popularity over the late 2017/early 2018 period.^[8] His followers on Twitch had grown from 500,000 in September 2017 to over 2 million by March 2018.^[11]

In March 2018, Blevins became the first Twitch streamer to surpass 3 million followers on the platform.^[12] Later that month, he set the record for the largest concurrent audience on an individual stream (outside of tournament events), 635,000, while playing Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott, and JuJu Smith-Schuster.^[13] This stream inspired Epic Games, the developers behind Fortnite, to host a charitable pro-am event featuring popular streamers like Blevins paired with famous celebrities in Fortnite at E3 2018 in June of that year; Blevins paired with electronic musician Marshmello and won the event.^[14][15] In April 2018, he broke his own viewing record during his event Ninja Vegas 2018, where he accumulated an audience of about 667,000 live viewers.^[16]

Blevins partnered with Red Bull Esports in June 2018, and held a special Fortnite event, the Red Bull Rise Till Dawn in Chicago on July 21, 2018, where players could challenge him.^[17] In April 2019, Red Bull released a limited-edition Red Bull can featuring an image of Blevins.^[18][19]

Blevins' rise in popularity on Twitch is considered to be synergistically tied to the success of Fortnite Battle Royale. In December 2018, Blevins estimated he had made close to US$10 million in 2018, while Epic Games reported they had earned over US$3 billion in revenue in the year, primarily due to Fortnite.^[20] He became the first PC player to surpass 5,000 Fortnite wins that same month.^[21] To acknowledge Blevins' importance to Fortnite's success, Epic added a Ninja-based cosmetic outfit to the game in January 2020 as the first part of an "Icon Series" for other real-life personalities associated with Fortnite.^[22]

Reuters reported that Blevins had been paid US$1 million by Electronic Arts to promote Apex Legends, a competing battle royale game to Fortnite, for playing the game on his Twitch stream and promoting the title through social media account during Apex release in February 2019.^[23]

On August 1, 2019, Blevins left Twitch to stream exclusively on Microsoft's Mixer platform.^[24][25] His wife and manager Jessica told The Verge that the contract with Twitch had limited the ability for Ninja to grow his brand outside of video gaming, and that because of the state of Twitch's community, "it really seemed like he was kind of losing himself and his love for streaming."^[26]

In addition to a large number of subscribers on Twitch and Mixer, Blevins has over 24 million subscribers on YouTube as of April 2021. At the time, he was earning over $500,000 per month from streaming Fortnite and credits the game's free-to-play business model as a growth factor.^[27]

Due to the shutdown of Mixer in July 2020, Blevins was released from his exclusivity deal, enabling him to stream on other platforms.^[28] On September 10, 2020, Blevins revealed that he would return to streaming on Twitch after signing an exclusive multiyear deal and streamed on the platform the same day.^[29]

On September 1, 2022, exactly two years after re-signing to Twitch, Blevins changed his name on his social media profiles, such as his Twitter^[30] and YouTube,^[31] to "User Not Found" with background graphics stating "Time Out". He simultaneously tweeted "I just need a break...I don't know when I will be back, or where".^[32] On September 8, 2022, Blevins announced his return to streaming, stating that he would simulcast his content across multiple platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.^[33]

Other appearances

Blevins and his family were featured in several episodes of the television game show Family Feud in 2015.^[34] In an episode aired August 2019, after he had achieved his fame, his family returned as contestants on Celebrity Family Feud.^[35]

In September 2018, Blevins became the first professional esports player to be featured on the cover of ESPN The Magazine, marking a breakthrough into mainstream sports fame.^[36][5]

Blevins worked with the record label Astralwerks in October 2018 to compile an album titled Ninjawerks: Vol. 1 featuring original songs by electronic music acts.^[37][38][39] The album was released on December 14, 2018.^[40]

Blevins was one of several Internet celebrities featured in YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind.^[41] Blevins appeared briefly during the NFL's "The 100-Year Game" ad alongside numerous several professional football players that aired during Super Bowl LIII in 2019. He was the only participant in the commercial with no ties whatsoever to football in any form.^[42]

Blevins has released several books with publishing house Random House. Random House imprint, Clarkson Potter, published Get Good: My Ultimate Guide to Gaming on August 20, 2019.^[43][44]

Blevins participated in the second season of the Fox reality music competition The Masked Singer as "Ice Cream". He was voted out after his first performance to Devo's "Whip It" and Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" and thus forced to unmasked. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Blevins said that he accepted an invitation to participate since his wife was a fan of the show.^[45][46]

In 2022, Blevins partnered with MasterClass to create a 30-day curriculum in which Blevins provides advice on how to become a successful streamer.^[47]

Film

Television

Web series