“Hi, I’m Sunny,” reads one profile on egirl.gg, a new website that connects gamers to so-called “egirls.” For a rate of five dollars a game, Sunny, 24, will play Fortnite with you. “Come game with me. Maybe I’ll sing, too.”
In her egirl.gg profile, Sunny wears pink lipstick, a septum ring, and a pout. One image depicts her gaming setup: two monitors, a glowing pink keyboard, a high-end gaming mouse, and a smattering of Pokémon miniatures. I commissioned her for a round of Fortnite, and once we dropped onto the map, Sunny's demeanor became serious and her gameplay seriously good, as she quickly built protective fortresses from which she trained a shotgun on enemies’ heads. After I died, she dutifully revived me.
“I like gaming and I like making money. Easy,” she said.
Under the tagline “Never Battle Alone” and against a purple background, egirl.gg hosts hundreds of profiles listing mostly women’s pictures, game rankings, customer ratings, and rates per game, which range from $1 to about $15. The girls whose profile pictures aren’t screenshots from an obscure anime are often sticking out their tongues or posing in cosplay. Kawaii emoticons pepper the listings, which also include audio samples so that potential customers can assess how they’d sound over in-game voice chats. There are a couple of “eboys,” too, who often adopt the appropriate cutesy language alongside pickup lines like “Don’t blame me if you fall in love.”
As long as there have been online games, there have been transactional relationships in them. Sugar babies and sugar daddies exchange high-level gear for companionship in World of Warcraft. Games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have “boosters”—paid highly-ranked or professional gamers who “boost” the in-game ranks of scrubs. And for years, women have advertised themselves as companions, boosters, or both over the gig website Fiverr. But egirl.gg centralizes that process, and focuses on companionship rather than rankings. Since it launched last week, it’s attracted thousands of applicants.
After Brian Xiong, a 25-year-old student at UC Berkeley, sold his Chinese fantasy novel translation company, he wondered what to sink his fresh chunk of cash into. He’s been a World of Warcraft player for 12 years, and more recently has fallen deep into the competitive strategy game League of Legends. “I don’t have many friends who play games,” he says, adding that at Berkeley everyone is too busy studying to queue up and rank up.
“It’s hard for me to find anyone to play games with. That’s part of why I created this site.”
