A 21-year-old Fortnite pro gives out computers to young gamers and plans for more through a new fund

NEW YORK (AP) — After dropping out in eighth grade to pursue esports, Cody Conrod wants to help others enter the increasingly expensive world of professional gaming. The 21-year-old competitive Fortnite player, better known as Clix to his more than 8 million Twitch followers, already provides hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gaming equipment through an annual holiday giveaway. Through his new holding company, launched Thursday, he is formalizing those efforts into the Dr3amin Access Fund.

Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular video games, features last-one-standing showdowns where players hunt down each other’s customizable avatars across an ever-shrinking map. Content creators have found loyal audiences by live streaming their exploits on platforms such as Twitch, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, and clipping the most eye-catching segments into viral short-form videos. But the equipment needed to compete at higher levels is pricey — and getting pricier.

The massive data center buildout has pushed up the costs of computers, graphics processors and memory chips. Conrod recommends a setup that can handle at least 120 frames per second for a GPU-intensive game such as Fortnite. And even sub-$500, entry-level PCs are becoming scarcer, according to Joost van Dreunen, a longtime games industry researcher and adjunct assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“Anybody who is starting up early in their career, anybody who is building their first PC, is having an increasingly difficult time finding hardware and components for it,” he said. His parents couldn’t afford a “crazy gaming computer” when he started playing when he was five. As Fortnite took the gaming world by storm, with publisher Epic Games offering $100 million tournament prizes, Conrod said he had to make do with a “worst of the worst” computer running 30 frames per second.

After months spent begging his parents to help buy a roughly $1,600 computer, Conrod said, his dad wrote up a contract: the teenager would have three months to pay him back by working for his plumbing company throughout the summer. Conrod ultimately needed just two weeks’ worth of Fortnite earnings to honor the deal. “If I never had that PC, if I never had access to that computer, this career — this setup that you see — would not be a thing,” Conrod…