Metafy pays the world's best gamers what they're worth: and Whop powers every payout

From a Pokémon world champion charging $20 an hour to $10 million paid out to coaches. This is how Metafy built the platform the world's best gamers were waiting for.

Every kid gets told to put down the controller and go play outside. It's a rite of passage. But for Josh Fabian, that was never going to happen. 

Growing up adopted and the only person of color in a small farm town in Pennsylvania, Josh felt that he didn't fit in. But rather than retreating into himself, he found a place where he did: gaming. Gaming was where he felt at home.

And he was good at it. Better than good – he was great.

As a teenager, Josh started competing in Yu-Gi-Oh trading card tournaments and found that not only did he fit in here, he was a leader in the space.

"Nothing mattered except for how much you prepared in advance," he says. "It was a great equalizer, and that was the first magic moment for me."

At 20, he became a father, living on food stamps with his then-girlfriend. For most people, that's the moment the dream dies, and you give up gaming to work in the 'real world'.

For Josh, it was the moment he went all in.

Gaming: a family business

By adulthood, Josh had reached the top 0.01% of players across ten different games. Streaming Clash Royale full time, he had 3,000 to 4,000 people watching every time he went live.

So naturally, he had hoped that his children would follow in his footsteps.

Thankfully, Josh's children were into Pokémon. But they wanted training, and they were not about to let their dad also be their tutor.

Sure, he may be among the best in the world at this, but to them, he's just dad. And having your dad tutor you is a bit like having your mom as your classroom teacher. Hard pass.

“They were into a Pokémon trading card game. I was so excited when they got into it for us, because the first thing I thought was, here’s my chance to ball with my kids, right? What I didn’t anticipate was them thinking I’m just my kids’ dumb dad,” Josh Fabian to Forbes

So he did what anyone trying to live vicariously through their children would do: he hired a coach. Not just any coach. He went straight to a Pokémon world champion, and asked what it would cost.

The answer was $20 an hour. The world champion, it turned out, was also working in a warehouse to make ends meet. The best in the world, charging less than his babysitter. Josh knew that had to change.

"$20 an hour. I was charging $100 an hour to coach Clash Royale and I wasn't even the best player in the world. This guy was the world champion. And he was making $30,000 a year. The skill existed. The infrastructure to actually get paid for it was almost non-existent. I knew if I didn't build something, someone else would. And they'd probably get it wrong."

The world champion charging $20 an hour

World-class gaming skills existed long before anyone figured out how to pay for it. At the time that Josh discovered how little gaming coaches were earning, there were 2.69 billion active video game players worldwide: a huge 60% of the global online population.

So, while the market for skilled gaming expertise was enormous, the infrastructure to actually deliver it (and make money with it) was almost non-existent.

Pro gamers, like the Pokémon coach Josh hired, were using a stack of unrelated tools to coach and get paid. The platforms they did use often took 30% cuts, and came with little to no market discovery.

And talent without a market is just talent, not a product.

"99.93% of streamers don't make a living wage. Twenty-five percent of the top 0.1% don't even make minimum wage.

Before Metafy, if you were a gamer trying to make real money, you were probably using Linktree for your bio, Fiverr for coaching, Udemy for courses, and Patreon for your community.

Four different platforms, four different logins, four different fee structures. And then you've gotta string them all together. That's what the hell we're fixing."

The model that puts coaches first

Most platforms are built for the buyer. Metafy was built for the seller.

Students pay a 5% fee on top of whatever the coach sets as their rate, meaning the coach's price is always their price. Metafy takes a 15% cut of this.

For coaches ready to go all-in, Metafy Pro removes the platform cut entirely, at $99/month, or $69/month billed annually. Everything they earn, they keep.

This is simple in theory, in an industry where charging sellers 30% was the norm, Metafy was making a statement at less than half that. It was a declaration of whose side the platform was on. Metafy isn't just for the big players.

"Each game has its own hobbyist community with its own micro economy. That's the whole point. You don't need a massive audience to make real money. You need a passionate community and somewhere to go. That's what we built."

And the market is only growing. In the US alone, over 5,000 schools now run NASEF esports programs, up from just 25 in 2017. A generation of competitive players is coming through the system with coaching as a normal part of their development, and when they're ready to level up, Metafy is where they go.

The coaches, for their part, don't need much convincing. Many link directly to their Metafy profile from their social channels: YouTube, Twitch, X. The platform has barely had to market to students at all: the coaches bring the audience with them.

How gamers build a business on Metafy

Metafy is more than a place to sell coaching sessions. Gamers on the platform are running entire businesses: one-on-one sessions, group events, on-demand guides, community subscriptions, paid Discord integrations. All of it lives on a single profile, under one roof.

Any gamer will know that one-on-one coaching has a natural ceiling. There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many students you can take on before burning out. So when Metafy introduced group classes, it changed what earning looked like entirely. Partners have earned up to $10,000 from a single two-hour session.

"When numbers like that come through I just stop for a second. Because I know what the other side looks like. I know what it means to be genuinely elite at something and have nowhere to take it.

And these aren't always the names you'd expect. Some of our biggest single session earners come from games most people outside the community have never heard of. Trading card games, niche strategy titles, older fighting games.

The skill is real, the community is passionate, and the demand was always there. The infrastructure just wasn't. That number isn't just a payout. It's proof that the ceiling we removed was real."

SmartTCG, aka Gabe, is ranked #2 in North America for Pokemon TCG. Through Metafy, Gabe runs Pokemon TCG coaching, replay reviews, event and deck list preparation, and even IRL sessions. Gabe also sells a post rotation guide, and access to a TCG Discord server.

Kaosx – a math professor and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege Pro – has built an entire operation around coaching, guides, and community, helping thousands of players reach the Pro Leagues.

Industry estimates put the global average salary for professional gamers at $138,000 in 2025, up 25% from the year before. North American professionals averaged $210,000, with top Counter-Strike 2 players earning up to $480,000 annually. 

But below this tier: ex-pros, high-ranked players, niche game champions, trading card specialists – coaching is often the only viable path to turning skill into income. That gap between what these players know and what they earn is exactly where Metafy operates.

"There are partners on Metafy clearing $200-300k a year. But the ones I think about most aren't necessarily the biggest earners. It's the ones who had good jobs, good salaries, remote work, real stability, and walked away anyway because this was the only thing that made them feel like they were doing something that mattered. Those bets on themselves are what this whole thing is for."

Whop powers every payout

Building a platform is one thing, but making sure partners actually get paid is another problem entirely.

Payouts are typically unglamorous infrastructure. But as boring as they may be, they are crucial to any business. Get them wrong and sellers leave. And with KYC verification, tax reporting, payout rails, refund logic, there is a lot that could go wrong. 

Metafy previously ran payouts through PayPal, but as the platform grew, that wasn't enough. Today, every withdrawal on Metafy runs through Whop.

"Making sure our partners get paid, properly and on their terms, is the whole promise. Get that wrong and nothing else matters.

PayPal worked until it didn't. As we scaled, the gaps showed up fast. And when a coach can't get paid reliably, it becomes a trust problem. That's the worst possible problem for us to have.

Our entire pitch to creators is that this platform is on their side. Whop cleaned that up. Now we're not apologizing for payment friction. We're just getting creators paid."

Whop handles the full payment flow, from checkout to payout routing. Coaches can withdraw via next-day ACH or instant transfer, fees are shown upfront, and there are no surprises. Gamers choose how and when they get paid.

And making sure coaches get paid – properly, reliably, on their terms –  is exactly what Metafy was built for. Whop makes sure it happens.

The best in the world finally earn like it

Remember that Pokémon world champion working in a warehouse? He was charging $20 an hour because there was nowhere better to go.

Josh and Metafy changed that.

Gamers on the platform have now collectively earned over $10 million. And the future looks even brighter: "We're building a machine that actually turns passion into profit. Not just for the names everyone knows. We're not building this for creators who already own empires. We're building it for the ones who haven't been given a stage yet."

Metafy builds the platform. Whop powers every payout. And the best in the world finally earn like it.