After dropping out of school in the eighth grade to pursue esports, Cody Conrod wants to make it easier for others to break into 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 hands out hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gaming equipment through an annual holiday giveaway. On Thursday, through a newly launched holding company, he formalized those efforts into the Dr3amin Access Fund.

A costly path to the top

Fortnite, one of the world's most popular video games, features last-one-standing showdowns in which players hunt down one another's customizable avatars across an ever-shrinking map. Content creators have built loyal audiences by live-streaming their exploits on platforms such as Twitch, the livestreaming service owned by Amazon, and clipping the most eye-catching moments into viral short-form videos.

But the equipment required to compete at higher levels is pricey — and getting pricier. A massive data center buildout has pushed up the costs of computers graphics processors, and memory chips. The buildout, tied largely to demand for artificial intelligence computing power, draws on many of the same processors and memory chips that consumer gaming PCs need. Conrod recommends a setup capable of running at least 120 frames per second for a GPU-intensive game such as Fortnite. 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.

A contract with his dad

Conrod knows the squeeze firsthand. His parents could not afford a "crazy gaming computer" when he started playing at age five. As Fortnite swept the gaming world — with publisher Epic Games putting up $100 million in tournament prizes — Conrod said he had to make do with a "worst of the worst" computer running 30 frames per second. That is a quarter of the 120-frames-per-second rate he recommends for competitive play today.

After months of begging his parents to help buy a roughly $1,600 computer, Conrod said, his father drew 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 settle 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 said, speaking from his Dallas bedroom, where he streams to thousands of viewers for hours at a time.

By age 14, another family conversation was in order. He had made nearly $200,000 through the Fortnite World Cup and concluded that he could not balance classes with his career. Waking up for middle school at 6 a.m. and then competing tournaments at 6 p.m. left him exhausted.

"You can't be tired when you're playing," he explained. Reaction times, he said, have to be "crisp." After some hesitation, his parents agreed to let him go all-in on competitive gaming.

Money at the top, stigma everywhere

Esports remains a field where it is "very hard to make a living," according to van Dreunen. The real money is clustered at the top, he said, and there is no "healthy" talent ecosystem. There is also the stigma — many people still do not view competitive gaming as a legitimate career, both van Dreunen and Conrod emphasized.

By lifting the financial burden of buying a computer, Conrod hopes more parents will let their children test the professional limits of their hobby. "They also have to get good grades if they're in school," he added, noting that he made the "still delusional but a little less delusional" decision to drop out only after he had won "a good amount of money."

A MrBeast-style structure

Full Box Inc., the new holding company, takes inspiration from MrBeast's sprawling media empire, which houses the YouTube megastar's food brands, production company, and philanthropy. Full Box Inc. encompasses Clix's clothing brand, clipping agency, and game studio, among other endeavors.

Conrod is still working out the funding model for the Dr3amin Access Fund. Some proceeds from his clothing brand will support the initiative, and other brands will have the opportunity to donate during his end-of-year giveaway, Clixmas. He will contribute as well: last year, he said, he personally put in about $100,000 as Clixmas gave away five custom PCs daily throughout the month of December. This year's Clixmas will be the first giveaway cycle since the effort was formalized under Full Box Inc.

Proof of concept

Conrod got some validation this past weekend, when his team took fourth place — and $120,000 — among 50 duos at the Fortnite Global Championship in Belgium. Among his competitors was a gamer known online as Joshreyli. The two met two years ago during the first-ever Clixmas, when Conrod challenged his audience to eliminate him in a one-on-one match in exchange for a computer. Josh won, received the PC, and has since earned six figures as a pro, according to Conrod.

"It's like a full-circle moment of what helps me want to do more stuff like this," Conrod said. "Those stories fire me up."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.