Professional Fortnite player and Twitch streamer DrLupo has shattered previous records by raising nearly $1 million for charity in under five hours. DrLupo partnered with Guardian Con, a Florida-based gaming convention for a marathon stream with the goal of raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which seeks to benefit children suffering from cancer and terminal illnesses.
While DrLupo has enough influence among the Fortnite community to get a fundraiser going strong, he included a number of details in a Tweet showing what viewers would see if certain goals were met.
These goals ranged from having Charlie, DrLupo’s son, play Fortnite on the live stream, to MrsDrLupo, his wife, playing Resident Evil for an hour, presumably because she would be terrified throughout. The highest goal at the million-dollar mark would have been for DrLupo to perform the Pon Pon dance, which fellow streamer Ninja performs often and to the amusement of children everywhere.
To make the stream more entertaining, there were incentives that would completely shift how the game would be played, such as dropping an item from a specific inventory slot, dropping all materials, and no longer being allowed to build for the remainder of a match. For those unfamiliar with Fortnite, this is akin to telling a racecar driver that, for the remainder of a race, they will no longer have access to the brake pedal and need to drive backward.
In the end, the total raised in a little under five hours was $920,343.98, which led to DrLupo emotionally thanking those who donated to the cause. This is not the first time DrLupo raised money for St. Jude, as he also raised over $1 million in 2018 with a 24-hour livestream.
The way in which video game players and enthusiasts raise money has certainly shifted in the past decade. While DrLupo and others should be commended for their fundraising efforts, there are many others who have worked to similar goals but used what we might consider older or more traditional fundraising techniques.
For example, in 2018, Blizzard announced the release of a pink-colored skin for the character Mercy in Overwatch, with proceeds going to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. In the short period of time that the skin was available, over $12 million was raised.
Even more traditional is the work done by Child’s Play, the charity founded and run by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, authors of the popular Penny Arcade comic. Since 2003, they have raised $44 million for children’s hospitals worldwide, often through auctioning video game-related items donated by developers and publishers in the industry.
It is heartwarming to see such acts of charity succeed so brilliantly, and if DrLupo’s stream is any indication of the future, which is most certainly seems to be, we are on the cusp of seeing a transformation in how fundraising can be accomplished through more modern means.
Hopefully, we'll see more streamers raising money for good causes in the future.