Game coaching is real work that real people pay for. It is also one of the most consistently oversold side businesses on the internet, because the gap between what coaching pages advertise and what coaches actually charge is enormous and easy to check.
On 5 August 2026 this audit pulled the live listings for the top-ranked coach in four of the largest competitive titles on Metafy, the biggest dedicated game coaching marketplace. Those coaches are not hobbyists. One is an eleven-year esports professional with a Liquipedia page and, by his own listing, more than ten thousand sessions delivered. Another played in the LEC for Fnatic and Excel, has been Challenger every season since Season 3, and is currently an assistant coach for an academy team. Another is a Rocket League major LAN champion who peaked at number one in the world and has played for FaZe and Dignitas.
Here is what the number one coach in each of those games charged for a one-hour session, as listed publicly on that date:
That is the ceiling, not the floor. These are the people the platform's own leaderboard puts at the top of the page. Before platform fees, before payment processing, before tax, and before the unpaid time it takes to get a booking at all.
If a business plan for game coaching assumes 75 to 150 US dollars an hour, it is not describing this market. This page describes this market.
Strip away the branding and there are four products being sold, with very different labour profiles.
Most coaching pages treat these as a menu. In practice they are a sequence, and almost everyone gets stuck at stage one.
The standard advice is that you need to be in roughly the top five to ten per cent of the ladder. That advice is repeated so often that it has stopped being checked. The underlying rank distributions are public, and they do not say what people think they say.
Cumulatively, Diamond IV is roughly the top 4.8 per cent and Master is roughly the top 0.92 per cent.
Diamond 1 is roughly the top 14.4 per cent. Immortal 2 is roughly the top 0.34 per cent.
Two things follow. First, the ranks that supposedly qualify you are not equivalent across games. Diamond in Valorant is a far more common rank than Diamond in League of Legends. Advice that says "Diamond and above" without naming the game is meaningless.
Second, and more importantly: being in the top five per cent qualifies you to have knowledge. It does not qualify you to sell it, because roughly one in twenty players is also in the top five per cent, and a meaningful fraction of them have noticed that coaching exists. The scarce resource is not rank. It is demand.
A warning on sourcing here. Rank distribution figures are a magnet for search-optimised pages run by boosting services, and their numbers contradict each other badly. During this research, pages claiming to report the same League of Legends distribution variously put Diamond and above at 1.5 per cent, 2 per cent, 3 to 4 per cent, and 11 per cent. The figures above are used because the source states its methodology and its upstream data provider. Treat any rank statistic from a site that also sells boosting as marketing.
The rate data below was collected directly from Metafy's public listing pages on 5 August 2026. It is a snapshot, not a survey, and it is skewed upward because these pages surface the highest-ranked coaches first. That skew matters: these are close to best-case prices.
The pattern across four unrelated games is a band of roughly 13 to 40 US dollars an hour at the very top of the marketplace. Package pricing consistently discounts the hourly rate rather than raising it.
There is a historical anchor that supports this rather than contradicting it. Metafy's founder has described the origin of the company: he approached the player then considered the best Pokémon trading card game player in the world to teach his children, and was quoted twenty dollars an hour. His reaction, in his own telling, was disbelief that it was so cheap. The company was built on the observation that elite competitive gamers were underpriced. Five years and 25 million dollars of Series A funding later, the top of the marketplace is at 13 to 40 dollars an hour.
That is the honest read: the price of expert game coaching has not gone up much, and platform fees have gone up a lot.
There is no reliable public dataset on coaching revenue by title, so anyone giving you a ranked list of the most profitable games is guessing. What can be reasoned about from observable structure:
The counterintuitive conclusion is that the biggest games are not automatically the best markets. Counter-Strike 2 is one of the largest competitive games in the world and its top-ranked coach on Metafy was charging 12.99 dollars an hour. League of Legends and Rocket League, with smaller ranked populations, both topped out at 40.
Metafy is the dominant dedicated marketplace and the one worth understanding in detail, because its fee history is the clearest illustration of platform risk in this sector.
When TechCrunch covered Metafy's 25 million dollar Series A in February 2022, the model was explicitly coach-first: the platform took no cut of coach income and charged students a 5 per cent fee. That was the pitch, and it was a genuine differentiator against competitors that were taking substantially more.
That model no longer exists. As of the pricing changes Metafy announced for April 2026, the structure is:
- Metafy Core. Free to join. Metafy takes 15 per cent of your earnings, including tips. This rose from 8 per cent effective 24 April 2026.
- Metafy Pro. 99 US dollars per month, or 69 per month billed annually, and you keep 100 per cent of earnings. The monthly price rose from 30 dollars effective 17 April 2026. A promotional annual rate of 49 per month was available until the end of May 2026, locked in for as long as the subscription continues.
- Buyer fee. The platform fee charged to students rose from 5 per cent to 7 per cent on 17 April 2026.
Metafy's own explanation is that the previous rates covered running the platform but not growth, and that the increase funds buyer acquisition through a programme it calls Community Boost.
The break-even between the two plans is straightforward and worth calculating before choosing. At 99 dollars a month against a 15 per cent commission, Pro becomes cheaper once you gross 660 US dollars a month. At the 69 dollar annual rate, break-even is about 460 dollars a month. At the promotional 49 dollar rate, about 327 dollars a month.
Put that next to the observed rates. At the Valorant top coach's 29 dollars an hour, 660 dollars a month is roughly 23 paid hours. At the Counter-Strike top coach's 12.99, it is over 50 paid hours a month. A new coach choosing Pro because it sounds more professional will very likely pay more in subscription than they would have paid in commission.
There is a further wrinkle that anyone signing up should notice. Metafy's published Coach Terms, which are the actual contract, were last updated 10 June 2022 and still state that "Coaches receive 100% of the Coaching Fees." That flatly contradicts the current Core commission documented in the help centre. The same contract describes a mandatory application questionnaire with approval at Metafy's sole discretion, while an April 2026 help article says the vetting process was scrapped entirely. This audit could not determine which document governs in a dispute. If you are relying on any specific term, ask support to confirm it in writing.
Other provisions in that contract that are easy to miss:
- You must be at least 18 to provide coaching services.
- Payments are not automatic. You must request payment by email, and Metafy pays within ten business days of the request.
- If payment cannot be delivered because your details are wrong, funds are held for twelve months and then forfeited to a charity of Metafy's choosing.
- If your account is inactive for twelve months, Metafy may close it.
- You grant an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide licence to your name, image, likeness and voice for any promotional or commercial purpose, and waive any right to be notified of, inspect, approve, or be paid for that use.
- Metafy may terminate your account at its sole discretion.
None of this is unusual for a marketplace. All of it is worth reading before you build a business on top of it.
Fiverr is the generalist alternative, and its economics are unusually well documented because it is a public company. In its annual report filed on 12 March 2026, Fiverr disclosed a marketplace take rate of 27.7 per cent for the twelve months to 31 December 2025, against 27.6 per cent the year before. That is the combined figure across both sides of the transaction: Fiverr's own filing confirms that "Fiverr sellers and buyers pay a commission for each completed transaction," and that it additionally charges foreign transaction fees to buyers paying in local currency.
Roughly 28 cents of every dollar transacted does not reach the seller. The commonly cited seller-side figure is 20 per cent of the order value, consistent with sellers being credited 80 per cent under Fiverr's Payment Terms. This audit could not verify that page directly because Fiverr blocks automated access to its legal portal; the 27.7 per cent total take rate, by contrast, comes from Fiverr's own filing and is solid.
The same filing contains context that matters more than the fee. Fiverr's marketplace gross merchandise value for 2025 was 1,073.0 million dollars, down 2.2 per cent year on year, driven by a 13.6 per cent fall in annual active buyers. Marketplace revenue fell 1.8 per cent. The company attributes this partly to weak small-business hiring and partly to artificial intelligence causing "diverging trends between high-skilled, complex services and low-skilled, simple services."
A marketplace losing buyers faster than it is losing revenue is a marketplace where competition among sellers is intensifying. That is the environment a new coaching gig enters.
Gamer Sensei is the cautionary example, and the reason to read platform risk seriously. Founded in 2016 in Boston, it billed itself as the world's biggest esports coaching platform and was acquired by Corsair on 9 November 2020. It no longer exists as a coaching marketplace.
Archive records show the site returning normal pages until around July 2025, with redirects appearing from August 2025 onward. Raw archived captures from December 2024 already show nothing but a stub reading "Gamer Sensei, a Corsair Business Brand." As of 5 August 2026, gamersensei.com issues a permanent redirect to a Corsair business-to-business esports page that sells hardware and venue design to clubs and universities and does not mention Gamer Sensei at all.
This audit could not establish a precise shutdown date or find a public closure announcement. What is verifiable is the outcome: a platform that a large number of coaches built their client acquisition on was acquired, wound down without visible ceremony, and its domain repointed at a hardware sales page. Coaches whose only channel was that platform lost it.
Direct sales through Discord, YouTube and Twitch are the fourth route, and structurally the only one where you own the relationship. They are also where every coach who complains about platform fees eventually ends up, and where every safeguarding and payment risk described below becomes entirely yours to manage.
Why most coaches earn very little
This is the part that coaching guides skip, and it is not a matter of opinion.
The clearest available figures come from Metafy's own funding-round publicity, which is the most favourable framing anyone will ever give this market.
In May 2021 the platform reported offering coaching from 450 coaches. By September 2021, TechCrunch reported that monthly spend through the platform had reached 190,000 US dollars, up from 76,000 in April of that year. Across the whole of 2021, coaches on the platform grossed over one million dollars in total.
Divide the September figure by the May coach count and the average coach was grossing somewhere around 420 dollars a month, before any platform cut and before tax. The real coach count by September was higher than 450, so the true average was lower. And an average is generous, because marketplace revenue is not distributed evenly. It follows a power law: the coach at the top of the leaderboard takes a large multiple of the median.
There is a direct check on this. In February 2022, an investor blog post from Forerunner Ventures, one of Metafy's backers, described the state of the platform. Its summary of how many coaches had reached full-time income was: four.
Four, out of hundreds, at a company that had just raised 25 million dollars and was actively promoting its coaches' success. That is not a criticism of Metafy. It is the base rate for this business.
A note on sourcing: TechCrunch reported 190,000 dollars of monthly platform spend in September 2021, while the Forerunner post said gamers on the platform "had cleared 100,000+" in September, against 1,206 a year earlier. These two figures do not reconcile cleanly and this audit could not determine why, though the difference between gross transaction value and coach payouts is a plausible explanation. Both numbers are small enough that the conclusion is unaffected.
The structural reasons most coaches earn little are visible on the listing pages themselves:
The leaderboard concentrates demand. Metafy's game pages rank coaches and badge the top one as "#1 Coach". A student with no way to evaluate coaching quality picks the top of the list. This is rational behaviour that produces a winner-takes-most outcome.
The top coach sets the price ceiling. If an ex-LEC professional charges 40 dollars an hour, a Diamond player cannot charge 60. Every coach below the top is priced relative to someone who is better and cheaper than they can afford to be.
Free consultations are now table stakes. Nearly every top coach observed offered a free fifteen-minute consultation, and the platform's "Rising Coaches" carousel listed six of seven profiles as offering free consults. Fifteen unpaid minutes per enquiry is a real cost, and it scales with the number of people who do not book.
Supply is effectively unlimited. Roughly one in twenty ranked players sits in the top five per cent, and the barrier to listing is now a free account. Metafy explicitly removed its vetting process in 2026.
Scheduling, timezones and burnout
The hourly rate is not the problem. The schedule is.
Coaching income is the product of rate and paid hours. Paid hours are constrained by when students want to play, which is evenings and weekends in their timezone. A coach with a day job is competing for exactly the hours they would otherwise be resting.
The observable response to this is geographic. Among the top-ranked coaches captured for this page, listed timezones included GMT plus 5:30, GMT plus 1, GMT plus 2, Central US and Eastern US. Coaches serve students across timezones because a single timezone does not contain enough demand to fill a schedule. One of the profiles advertised availability "24x7 for consultations."
That is what filling a coaching calendar actually looks like: taking calls at unsociable hours because that is when the buyer is free.
The second cost is that coaching is not playing. It is teaching, in real time, to someone who is frustrated, often losing, and sometimes tilted. Playing your best game is recovery. Watching someone else play it badly and explaining why, for four hours, is not. A number of the review comments captured during this research praised coaches specifically for patience and for making students feel safe making mistakes. That is emotional labour, and it is the part of the job that people who take up coaching because they love the game are least prepared for.
This audit found no published research on burnout rates among online game coaches and will not invent one. What can be said with confidence is structural: the job converts a leisure activity into evening and weekend shift work at a low hourly rate, delivered to customers in a heightened emotional state. Whether that is sustainable is a question to answer before you build a schedule around it, not after.
The practical mitigations that do not require pretending the problem away:
- Cap the number of live sessions per week at a number you would still accept in month six, and set it before you have bills depending on it.
- Batch VOD reviews rather than interleaving them with live sessions, because switching between the two costs more than either alone.
- Price unsociable hours higher, or refuse them. Availability is the only lever a new coach has, which is exactly why it is the one that gets given away first.
- Treat the free consultation as a cost centre with a limit, not as marketing that is free because no money changes hands.
Boosting is a different business with a different risk
Boosting means playing on someone else's account to raise their rank. It is not coaching, and it is not a grey area.
Riot Games publishes its enforcement position explicitly. Account sharing is defined as "giving or selling an account for use by another individual that is not the original creator," or using an account created by someone else. Boosting is defined as "queuing up on an account that is not their own to inflate said account's MMR." The published penalty escalation is:
- First offence: 3-day ban
- Second offence: 14-day ban
- Third offence: permanent ban
Alongside that, all league points and matchmaking rating gained through boosting are reverted, honour level is reduced, and the account is excluded from that season's ranked rewards. Riot states that both the booster and the boosted account receive the same penalties, which means selling a boost hands your customer a ban as part of the service. Riot has separately extended penalties to content that promotes boosting services and account sales.
The commercial problems, beyond the bans:
- Your own account is the asset. A permanent ban on a Challenger or Radiant account destroys the credential that made you employable as a coach.
- The customer has an incentive to dispute the charge after receiving a ban, and you cannot prove delivery of a service that both parties agreed to conceal.
- You are handing your credentials, or receiving someone else's, in a transaction where neither side can go to the platform for recourse.
- Boosting produces no repeat business by design. The customer ends up at a rank they cannot hold and either re-buys or churns.
Coaching and boosting are often listed side by side by the same sellers, which is precisely why coaching carries reputational damage it did not earn. If you intend to coach seriously, refusing boosting requests is a business decision, not a moral one.
Safeguarding when the student is a child
This is the section that almost every guide to game coaching omits entirely, and it is the one with the most serious consequences for getting it wrong.
Start with the facts of the situation. Coaching is sold one-to-one, over voice, usually in private, often at night, sometimes for months, between an adult and a stranger who may be a child. That is not a hypothetical: on the Metafy Valorant page captured for this research, one of the visible public reviews was written by a parent who had purchased coaching for their eight-year-old son.
The Entertainment Software Association's 2026 figures put the average American player at 37 years old across a population of 212.3 million players, and its 2025 report found that 83 per cent of Generation Alpha, ages five to twelve, play weekly. Both things are true at once: the median customer is an adult, and a substantial minority are children.
What the platforms require. Metafy's Coach Terms require coaches to be at least 18. Beyond that, this audit searched the full text of those terms, roughly 18,900 characters, for every relevant term. The words "minor", "child", "children", "safeguard", "parent", "guardian", "background check", "chaperone" and "abuse" appear zero times. The only references to age concern coach eligibility. This audit could not confirm Metafy's published minimum age for students.
The plain reading is that the platform imposes no safeguarding obligations on coaches at all. If you coach a child through it, whatever protection exists is what you put in place yourself.
United Kingdom. Whether online game coaching counts as "regulated activity with children" is genuinely unsettled. The Government's guidance defines regulated activity to include teaching, training, instruction, care or supervision of children carried out more than three days in a 30-day period, or once overnight between 2am and 6am, where there is "the opportunity for face-to-face contact with children". Whether a voice or video call satisfies "face-to-face contact" is not resolved in that guidance, and this audit could not find an authoritative determination either way. Notably, moderating a web service used by children is separately listed as regulated activity in its own right, with no supervision test applied, which is worth considering if you run a paid Discord with under-18 members.
What did change materially: since 21 January 2026, self-employed workers in the UK can apply for Enhanced and Enhanced with Barred List DBS checks for the first time, through a registered DBS umbrella body. Two conditions apply. The work must be paid, and the role must be eligible under the existing rules. A private individual, such as a parent, cannot apply on your behalf; you must apply yourself. Published fees are £21.50 for a Basic or Standard check and £49.50 for an Enhanced or Enhanced with Barred List check, with umbrella bodies charging their own administrative fee on top.
If your role is eligible, this is now the single most credible differentiator available to a UK coach working with young players, and it costs under a hundred pounds. If your role is not eligible, applying anyway is not an option, and claiming a check you do not hold is fraud. Check eligibility with a registered umbrella body rather than guessing.
United States. There is no single federal regulator of youth coaching. The Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017 imposes mandatory reporting and background screening duties on national governing bodies within federally funded amateur sport. Privately sold online game coaching sits outside that framework. State law varies considerably, and requirements that apply to a youth sports league do not automatically apply to an individual selling sessions from home. Check your own state.
Canada and Australia. Both operate provincial and state-level working-with-children screening regimes with materially different names, thresholds and costs. This audit did not verify current requirements in either country and will not guess at them. If you are coaching minors from either, check your provincial or state scheme directly before you take a booking.
Why this matters beyond compliance. The NSPCC's analysis of UK police data recorded 7,263 Sexual Communication with a Child offences in the most recent year covered, drawn from 44 police forces, roughly double the total from 2017/18 when the offence, section 15A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, first came into force. NSPCC's own pages block automated retrieval, so these figures were taken from published summaries rather than read directly from source; treat the exact number as approximate and the trend as well established.
The relevance is not that coaches are suspects. It is that private voice contact between adults and children, in gaming environments specifically, is a known risk channel, and that a coach who has not thought about this is one ambiguous interaction away from a situation with no good outcome. Protecting the child and protecting yourself are the same set of measures.
Practical steps that cost nothing:
- Ask the student's age before the first session, and record the answer.
- Where the student is a minor, require a parent or guardian to book, to be present at the start of the first session, and to have access to the same channel used for coaching.
- Keep all communication on the platform or in a channel that logs and retains history. Never move a minor to a private, disappearing-message channel.
- Record sessions where the student and guardian consent, and keep the recordings. A recording protects both parties.
- Do not offer one-to-one coaching to minors through direct sales channels where no third party holds any record of the relationship.
- Decline requests to add a minor as a friend on personal accounts.
- Write these rules down on your listing page. Parents notice.
If that list reads as onerous for a 25 dollar session, that is a legitimate reason to coach adults only, and saying so publicly is a perfectly respectable business position.
Tax and the paperwork nobody mentions
Coaching income is self-employment income from the first pound or dollar, regardless of whether a platform sends you a form.
United States. Self-employment tax is 15.3 per cent, comprising 12.4 per cent for Social Security and 2.9 per cent for Medicare, and you owe it once net self-employment earnings reach 400 dollars. The Social Security portion applies up to an annual wage base, which the Social Security Administration puts at 184,500 dollars for 2026, up from 176,100 dollars in 2025. It is re-indexed every year, so check the figure for the year you are actually filing. An additional 0.9 per cent Medicare tax applies above 200,000 dollars for single filers and 250,000 for married filing jointly.
Separately, the Form 1099-K reporting threshold is currently 20,000 dollars and more than 200 transactions, per IRS guidance reviewed in June 2026. Note the trap: Metafy's Coach Terms reference a 600 dollar threshold for 1099 forms, which relates to a different form and predates the current position. The thresholds govern what the platform must report, not what you must declare. Not receiving a form does not make the income untaxed.
United Kingdom. The £1,000 trading allowance means gross trading income up to that amount need not be reported. Above £1,000 you must register for Self Assessment, by 5 October following the end of the tax year in which you crossed it. Above the allowance you choose between claiming the flat £1,000 as a deduction or claiming actual expenses, whichever is larger. For a coach whose only real costs are a headset and a share of a broadband bill, the flat allowance is often the better option, but run both.
Canada and Australia both treat this as business income with their own registration thresholds and indirect tax rules, including goods and services tax registration once turnover passes a threshold. This audit did not verify current figures for either and will not invent them. Check with the Canada Revenue Agency or the Australian Taxation Office.
One further point that applies everywhere: if you sell to students in other countries, you may be dealing with cross-border indirect tax on digital services. Marketplaces typically handle this; direct sales through your own payment link typically do not. That is a real reason to be cautious about leaving a platform purely to avoid its fee.
What actually goes wrong
These are structural risks, not anecdotes. Where a rate or frequency could not be sourced, that is stated.
Chargebacks after delivery. Coaching is irreversible. Once the hour is taught, it cannot be returned. A card dispute weeks later leaves you having delivered the service and lost the money. Marketplaces absorb some of this, which is part of what the commission buys, and direct sales do not. This audit found no published chargeback rate for game coaching and will not estimate one.
Requests to pay outside the platform. Framed as saving you both the fee. It removes dispute protection, breaches the platform's terms, and is the standard opening move for a buyer who intends not to pay. The fee is the price of recourse.
Coaching requests that are actually account-sharing requests. "Can you just play a few games on my account so I can watch" is a boost. Both accounts get penalised, and the customer will not accept that outcome quietly.
Free-session farming. A universal free consultation policy attracts people who will collect consultations from a dozen coaches and book none. Watch the conversion rate of free consultations to paid bookings, and if it is poor, change the offer rather than working harder at it.
Platform fee changes. Metafy's coach economics went from a 0 per cent commission in 2022 to either 15 per cent or 99 dollars a month in 2026. Nothing prevents another change. A business whose margin depends on a fee schedule you do not control is not a business you control.
Platform disappearance. Gamer Sensei was the largest platform in the sector, was acquired by a public company, and its domain now points at a hardware sales page. Assume any platform can do this, and keep a means of contacting your own students that does not depend on it.
Sponsorship and brand-deal phishing. Coaches who build a YouTube or Twitch presence become targets for approaches that carry malware in the attachment. This is a well-established pattern against gaming creators generally. This audit did not quantify it for coaches specifically. Treat unsolicited sponsorship files as hostile.
Credential inflation by competitors. Ranks and achievements on listing pages are largely self-reported. Competing against claims you cannot verify, some of which are false, is part of the market. The counter is verifiable evidence: a linked Liquipedia page, a public match history, an actual leaderboard placing. The top coaches observed for this page all linked to independently verifiable records, which is itself instructive.
Who should skip this
Anyone who needs the money on a timetable. The median outcome is a small number of bookings a month. The observed base rate for full-time income at the leading platform, in its own best year of publicity, was four coaches. Treat this as income that may arrive, not income that will.
Anyone whose plan is to charge 100 dollars an hour. The top-ranked coach in four major titles charges between 13 and 40. Unless you have a credential and an audience that the ex-LEC professional does not, you will not clear that ceiling by deciding to.
Anyone counting on rank alone. One in twenty ranked players is in the top five per cent. Rank is the entry requirement, not the product. The product is the ability to explain, on demand, to a frustrated stranger, for an hour.
Anyone unwilling to build an audience. Every coach visible at the top of these marketplaces arrived with something external: a professional record, a YouTube channel, a competitive history, a university coaching post. The marketplace ranks and monetises existing reputation. It does not create it.
Anyone who cannot commit to evenings and weekends indefinitely. Demand exists when students are free. That is your leisure time, permanently.
Anyone unwilling to handle safeguarding properly. If the rules in the safeguarding section read as too much trouble, coach adults only and say so on your listing. Coaching children casually, with no records, no guardian involvement and no logged channel, is the single worst risk in this business, for the child first and for you second.
Anyone who wants coaching to be like playing. It is not. It is teaching. People who love the game and dislike teaching burn out fast, and usually resent the game afterwards.
If you are still going to do it
A defensible starting sequence, in order:
- Establish the credential before the listing. A verifiable public record beats a self-description. If you have no external evidence of your rank, get some.
- Pick one game and one narrow role or problem. Specialisation is the only lever that lets you avoid direct comparison with the top generalist.
- Start on Metafy Core, not Pro. Commission-only costs nothing until you earn. Move to Pro only when you consistently gross above the break-even you calculated for the plan you would buy.
- Price at the observed market, then hold. Undercutting a 13 dollar market is not a strategy.
- Cap free consultations and track how many convert. If fewer than one in three books, the problem is the offer, not the volume.
- Decide your position on minors before your first booking, and write it on your listing.
- Register for tax before you need to, not after. The UK deadline is 5 October following the tax year; the US threshold is 400 dollars of net earnings.
- Keep your own list. Email or a Discord you control. Every platform in this sector has either changed its fees substantially or disappeared.
- Reassess after three months against paid hours, not enquiries. Enquiries feel like progress. They are not revenue.
The honest summary: game coaching is a real skill with a real, small market, a low price ceiling set by genuine professionals, rising platform fees, and a safeguarding dimension that most people selling advice about it have never mentioned. It can be a decent supplementary income for someone with an existing audience and a genuine talent for teaching. It is a poor plan for replacing a salary, and the numbers published by the industry's own best-funded company are the clearest evidence of that.