Twitch Streamers Are Getting Paid $50,000 An Hour To Play New Games: They Deserve It – Forbes

The past few years have been full of impressive achievements in the realm of professional gaming, whether it’s enormous prize pools for esports events or huge yearly incomes for top Twitch streamers or gaming YouTubers. But now the era of the insane sponsorship deal is upon us.

The Wall Street Journal has published a new report that details how top streamers, those who attract 15,000 or more viewers simultaneously, can earn between $25,000 and $50,000 an hour when publishers pay them to stream a newly released game.

It’s not a new practice, but its frequency has been increased as of late, and was seen in the high profile case of Apex Legends recently, where rumor has it EA paid Ninja $1 million to stream Apex Legends for a few days. If that was $50,000 an hour, and Ninja played Apex on sponsored streams for 20 hours across a few days, that math does indeed check out.

This may sound absolutely insane, but the article details a number of publishers from EA to Take Two who are lining up to throw money at streamers for sponsored game launches.

And honestly, it’s a great idea.

When I say these streamers deserve it, I’m not saying the physical act of playing a new game for a few days is labor worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I am saying that this is an extremely effective way to market a new game compared to traditional advertising. You have these streamers who have captive audiences of anywhere from 5,000 to 200,000 viewers at a time, depending on what they’re playing, and it’s a direct showcase of your product not in a thirty second, questionably targeted TV ad or pop-up banner, but it’s hours of gameplay at a time streamed directly to your target audience through the mechanism of a public figure they like and trust. There’s really nothing else like it across other forms of advertising. It’s like paying Lebron James to speak into a camera for two days straight about new pair of shoes on a stream watched by thousands or millions of captive fans. It’s a level of direct targeting and mass exposure to a product that is invaluable, so invaluable that $25-$50,000 an hour, depending on the streamer, is almost a steal, especially when you consider the tens of millions of dollars that are already spent on far more traditional and far less effective forms of advertising in the industry.

All that said, there’s an aspect of this that is massively frustrating. Especially to someone like me, personally.

Games journalists have endured years of harassment that our coverage of certain games has been “bought and paid for” when we give out high or low review scores or provide positive or negative coverage. There have been huge scandals over things like a journalist being fired for giving a low score to a game that was site’s advertising partner, though events like that are few and far between.

If I said that Activision paid me $100 to give a good score to the new Call of Duty, I would be instantly blacklisted by the entire industry, almost certainly fired, and would probably never see my reputation recover. And yet streamers can take tens of thousands of dollars, millions even, to serve as literal hype machines for new games, and their audiences are more loyal to them than ever. Why? Here’s Dr.Lupo explaining to WSJ:

“We have the power to convince people to buy a game they’re on the fence about,” said Benjamin Lupo, one of the live-streamers Electronic Arts paid to play “Apex Legends” for a few hours at its release Feb. 4. “They see us as more trustworthy than a name they don’t recognize that wrote a review. They can see our faces. It’s live interaction.”

So people trust them more because they…seem more like actual people than a byline on a page? It sounds strange, but it’s true, it really is. Streamers feel like friends. Most journalists don’t.

Streamer thoughts on a game also do not feed into review scores, and this is an industry that still lives or dies by those, no matter how much influencers are uh, influencing, elsewhere. So even if Ninja is being paid $1 million to hype up Apex Legends, he’s not giving the game a paid-for 10/10 on Metacritic, so no one really minds.

I don’t mean to suggest that all streamers are being underhanded by taking sponsorship deals, all of which have to be disclosed under law. If I was in their position, I’d be doing the same. And after all, you can’t really just flat-out lie about how you feel about games or else over time your audience will not trust you if you’re promoting clearly terrible stuff. The Apex situation was one where the game was actually good so all the streamer hype felt genuine. But I can see if this keeps happening, and every game has dozens of sponsored hype streams at launch, that the effects may wear thin, and someday we may get to a point where these content creators are trusted less than the journalists who are not accepting giant checks to play games and give their thoughts on them.

The industry is in a strange place, full of celebrities who can do no wrong and a press which can do no right, or at least that’s how it’s all framed. From a pure marketing perspective, this is absolutely the path forward for most publishers. For the public? Just keep all this in mind as your favorite streamers have wild amounts of fun with X or Y new release.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.

“>

The past few years have been full of impressive achievements in the realm of professional gaming, whether it’s enormous prize pools for esports events or huge yearly incomes for top Twitch streamers or gaming YouTubers. But now the era of the insane sponsorship deal is upon us.

The Wall Street Journal has published a new report that details how top streamers, those who attract 15,000 or more viewers simultaneously, can earn between $25,000 and $50,000 an hour when publishers pay them to stream a newly released game.

It’s not a new practice, but its frequency has been increased as of late, and was seen in the high profile case of Apex Legends recently, where rumor has it EA paid Ninja $1 million to stream Apex Legends for a few days. If that was $50,000 an hour, and Ninja played Apex on sponsored streams for 20 hours across a few days, that math does indeed check out.

This may sound absolutely insane, but the article details a number of publishers from EA to Take Two who are lining up to throw money at streamers for sponsored game launches.

And honestly, it’s a great idea.

When I say these streamers deserve it, I’m not saying the physical act of playing a new game for a few days is labor worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I am saying that this is an extremely effective way to market a new game compared to traditional advertising. You have these streamers who have captive audiences of anywhere from 5,000 to 200,000 viewers at a time, depending on what they’re playing, and it’s a direct showcase of your product not in a thirty second, questionably targeted TV ad or pop-up banner, but it’s hours of gameplay at a time streamed directly to your target audience through the mechanism of a public figure they like and trust. There’s really nothing else like it across other forms of advertising. It’s like paying Lebron James to speak into a camera for two days straight about new pair of shoes on a stream watched by thousands or millions of captive fans. It’s a level of direct targeting and mass exposure to a product that is invaluable, so invaluable that $25-$50,000 an hour, depending on the streamer, is almost a steal, especially when you consider the tens of millions of dollars that are already spent on far more traditional and far less effective forms of advertising in the industry.

All that said, there’s an aspect of this that is massively frustrating. Especially to someone like me, personally.

Games journalists have endured years of harassment that our coverage of certain games has been “bought and paid for” when we give out high or low review scores or provide positive or negative coverage. There have been huge scandals over things like a journalist being fired for giving a low score to a game that was site’s advertising partner, though events like that are few and far between.

If I said that Activision paid me $100 to give a good score to the new Call of Duty, I would be instantly blacklisted by the entire industry, almost certainly fired, and would probably never see my reputation recover. And yet streamers can take tens of thousands of dollars, millions even, to serve as literal hype machines for new games, and their audiences are more loyal to them than ever. Why? Here’s Dr.Lupo explaining to WSJ:

“We have the power to convince people to buy a game they’re on the fence about,” said Benjamin Lupo, one of the live-streamers Electronic Arts paid to play “Apex Legends” for a few hours at its release Feb. 4. “They see us as more trustworthy than a name they don’t recognize that wrote a review. They can see our faces. It’s live interaction.”

So people trust them more because they…seem more like actual people than a byline on a page? It sounds strange, but it’s true, it really is. Streamers feel like friends. Most journalists don’t.

Streamer thoughts on a game also do not feed into review scores, and this is an industry that still lives or dies by those, no matter how much influencers are uh, influencing, elsewhere. So even if Ninja is being paid $1 million to hype up Apex Legends, he’s not giving the game a paid-for 10/10 on Metacritic, so no one really minds.

I don’t mean to suggest that all streamers are being underhanded by taking sponsorship deals, all of which have to be disclosed under law. If I was in their position, I’d be doing the same. And after all, you can’t really just flat-out lie about how you feel about games or else over time your audience will not trust you if you’re promoting clearly terrible stuff. The Apex situation was one where the game was actually good so all the streamer hype felt genuine. But I can see if this keeps happening, and every game has dozens of sponsored hype streams at launch, that the effects may wear thin, and someday we may get to a point where these content creators are trusted less than the journalists who are not accepting giant checks to play games and give their thoughts on them.

The industry is in a strange place, full of celebrities who can do no wrong and a press which can do no right, or at least that’s how it’s all framed. From a pure marketing perspective, this is absolutely the path forward for most publishers. For the public? Just keep all this in mind as your favorite streamers have wild amounts of fun with X or Y new release.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.