16-Year-Old Wins $3 Million AS "Fortnite" Champion.
GORANI: Parents around the world might just be thinking they should allow their kids to play more video games, after all. After a 16-year-old gamer took home a full $3 million at the first-ever Fortnite World Cup. The teen bested 99 others in New York to become champ of the popular battle Royale. Claire Sebastian is staying on top of all of this for us from New York. I have no clue what Fortnite is, what it's about. But tell us how you can end up winning $3 million playing the game.</s>CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: A lot of practice, Hala. These kids, some of them spend, you know, 8 to 12 hours a day playing this game. It really does take a lot to become a champion. You also need to be someone who streams it online. This isn't just something that people do in their basement. It's a spectator thing as well. This YouTube, there's Twitch, which is a platform owned by Amazon. But this prize money staggering, Hala, when you look at it in the context of other actual sports. Sports that involved not sitting in a chair. In Wimbledon, you don't win as much and the open golf championship. Tour de France which happened this weekend. The Fortnite World Cup when they won about six times what the Tour de France champion one. Also in that same stadium, the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens. Next month, they'll have the U.S. Open. The winner there gets $3.8 million which was a little bit more than Fortnite. But still within the range. So you get a sense of the staggering amounts of money here. And everyone who turned up to the finals who qualified after 10 weeks of heat got at least $50,000. So for these kids, the average age is about 16. These are life-changing amounts of money.</s>GORANI: But where does the money come from? Sponsors?</s>SEBASTIAN: So I mean, Epic Games is the one that's holding the event. They are the company behind Fortnite. They get their money -- actually, the interesting thing about Fortnite is that the game that's become so popular is free. It doesn't actually sell it. You can download it for free across multiple platforms. That's part of the reason why it's become so popular that it's zero dollar barrier to entries. But once you're in the game, you spend money on what's called V-Bucks. That's the currency that upgrades within the game and you use that to buy different cosmetic aspects to your players, different modes which make them dance in certain ways. And all of this has led to a lot of spending and a lot of profits for this company.</s>GORANI: Right. I mean, obviously, people who say that kids shouldn't spend eight, 10, 12 hours a day playing video games, this is going to be -- this is going to come as bad news to parents because this could be an incentive now.</s>SEBASTIAN: It's an incentive. It's a career. It's not just the winnings that they get from these tournaments, Hala. These kids are making five, six figures salaries, even without -- you know, their audiences that they've build up on Twitch. They can get ticked by their audiences. They get sponsorships and endorsements. This is a very lucrative business. But it's interesting, you know, we've seen the schools when this initially started to peak last year. We're very worried about this. Now, E-sports is part of high schools at eight U.S. states including in Georgie.</s>GORANI: Unbelievable. Clare Sebastian, thanks much. Appreciate it. I'm Hala Gorani. I'll see you next time on HALA GORANI TONIGHT. Stay with CNN. A quick break and then it's "QUEST MEANS BUSINESS."