EYstreem’s YouTube production company just landed a $5 million investment. What’s it gonna do with all that cash?

Jordan Barclay uploaded his first YouTube video when he was 10 years old. The one-minute and 39-second clip is a shaky, zoomed-too-close camera recording of his laptop screen as he plays Minecraft.

When he posted it, he had no idea that four years later, his channel EYstreem would be generating enough traffic to become a full-fledged business.

In 2012, he filed to have The EYstreem Company incorporated. “And from that point, I was mostly running a business,” he tells Tubefilter. “I filmed maybe three days a week and I would run the business for the rest of the week.”

“Running the business” meant developing “a really robust system” for content production, he says. That system grew his own channel to nearly 10 million subscribers and over 125 million monthly views. But he wanted to see that same success across a swath of channels–which is why, in 2010, he launched Spawnpoint Media, a family-friendly content production studio that builds Minecraft and Roblox-centric YouTube channels from scratch and casts up-and-coming Australian actors to host them.

“That was the aim, because it’s kind of every YouTuber’s dream, but very few manage to pull it off,” Barclay, who’s now 21, says. “Especially across mediums, with totally different actors.”

Spawnpoint Media now has over 80 employees and produces 30+ videos a month for its six proprietary channels, EYstreem, EYstreem Reacts (1.25 million subs), Firelight (2 million), FirelightGamez (164K), Sponty (110K), and Milo and Chip (782K). The channels have collectively generated more than 3.5 billion views, and every year since 2021, they have been responsible for YouTube’s top-watched Australian-produced gaming content, Barclay says.

Spawnpoint also just snagged a $5 million investment from Spotter, which it plans to use to open a multimillion-dollar studio in Melbourne.

That studio will allow Spawnpoint to expand its unusual production process, which involves the core production team thinking up video concepts and writing scripts, then tapping the virtual design team to build sets in either Minecraft or Roblox. That’s when the actors come in.

“Normally when people play video games, they’re reacting to the game they’re playing,” Barclay says. “But for us, it’s quite different. The entire game moves around them based on what the script says the game is going to do. So the virtual sets team will set this all up beforehand, and the actor will come in and they will basically follow what the set makes them do.”

Once the actor’s done filming, their part in the process is over. The Spawnpoint team handles all post-production, packaging, and posting to the channel.

Spawnpoint’s new studio will facilitate this process with gaming booths and automated camera and lighting rigs set on an overhead grid, like in a television production studio. It’ll also have offices and an IRL space with a kitchen set and a cyclorama.

“Because our videos have clear formats, they follow the same types of camera styles and lighting,” Barclay says. “So with our new system, it will be as simple as a gamer jumping into one of the booths, or an IRL actor jumping into the IRL space. They’ll click a button, and all the lights, cameras, automatic, and then they can just start filming,. There isn’t any of that bump in, bump out, which will allow us to be more efficient and capture a lot more footage so that we can really focus on enhancing, and the actors can do a better job.”

Barclay says talent support is a central focus for Spawnpoint, because its actors are usually amateurs. When he was first getting the company off the ground, Barclay sourced school friends he knew had “big potential” as hosts. Now, when looking for fresh talent, he often looks to TikTok.

“The bar for our entry is actually pretty low, because the talent in Australia is so few and far between,” he says. “We do heavy training work.”

For example, the actors for Spawnpoint’s newest channel, Milo and Chip–launched in December 2023–trained with the studio for nearly a year before their channel’s debut.

“I usually have a rule that I don’t expect anything from a team member for the first three months,” Barclay says. “In a year, all I’m expecting to see is improvement. It doesn’t have to be that they’re doing everything we want them to do. It doesn’t have to be X amount of improvement. We just want to see improvement, because we believe that people improve at different speeds. That’s why they’re so loyal to our team, because we invest in them like crazy.”

Spawnpoint is currently developing two more channels, both of which it intends to debut sometime this year.

Barclay says the investment Spawnpoint received from Spotter was instrumental in being able to grow the business.

“We’ve always wanted to do this project, but [the investment] allowed us to do it a lot bigger and better than we would’ve been able to do it otherwise,” he says. “It’s given us a lot more security in the sense that, traditionally, people like us have to rent spaces, but we were able to purchase this space and build it ourselves. It really contributes to optimizing every single bit.”

In addition to purchasing the studio space, Spawnpoint poured cash into salaries and bonuses for its cast and crew, which Barclay thinks is one of the biggest things it can do to ensure continuing quality of its content.

“We really, really, really value putting our team members above everything,” he says. “They are the lifeblood of the company. That’s what makes the videos so special.”