Jordon "CaptainSparklez" Maron makes a living as a game broadcaster.
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Jordan ‘CaptainSparklez’ Maron lives the fairy tale life of getting paid to play Minecraft (interview)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 8 min

Jordan “CaptainSparklez” Maron has had a charmed life as a YouTuber and Twitch livestreamer. He quit college to stream games on Twitch and post videos of his Minecraft play on YouTube. And now he makes a living at it, with more than 8.75 million subscribers and 1.6 billion video views.

He has had a great ride for five years, and now, at the ripe age of 23, he is parlaying his fame into making games. Maron leveraged his fame to create a new app company, Xreal, with Activision founder and gaming pioneer Howard Marks. The company created Fortress Fury, which been downloaded more than 2 million times since its recent launch. The game is one of many that aspires to become part of the esport phenomenon on mobile.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.