Twitch streamer Chance ‘Sodapoppin’ Morris’ mother has revealed that she thought his early streaming income was fake. She admitted that she thought his first PayPal donations were “Monopoly money.”
In a recent episode of the Punching Down podcast, Sodapoppin and his mother went through the first chapter of his streaming career, including how unclear the concept of making a living online was at the time the industry was in its infancy.
‘I thought it was like fake’
Sodapoppin’s mother openly expressed that she did not understand that PayPal was a valid financial system. She remembered telling a friend that she seemed to notice that her son had a little coming in but she was not sure that it was real.
“I didn’t know PayPal was a real thing,” she said. “I thought it was like fake, like Monopoly money.”
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She recalled telling a friend: “Oh, he’s got some money, but I don’t think it’s real money.”
Before he was even 18, Sodapoppin was streaming and the only structure his family could come up with was what it might be. One of the initial defining moments was when high-spending World of Warcraft players in Dubai started sending large amounts through PayPal.
Sodapoppin remembered one of these donations amounting to 10,000 dollars and remarked upon it in almost exactly the perspective of a naive teenager who has just found out that there is an actual world and that this could be his job. In an interview on his career path on Dexerto, his mother said that she had no idea of how to conceptualize that people could play in the bedroom and
The lack of faith was not limited to the family of Sodapoppin. In the same episode of the podcast he recounted the experience of early streamers across the board facing systemic opposition to the legitimacy of streaming income by banks and landlords who would not accept the income which was based on PayPal donations as a valid and reliable revenue source. When he offered bank statements as evidence of income he was greeted with incomprehension.
