The recent launch of Resident Evil Requiem generated undeniable excitement — record sales, streaming numbers, and a long-awaited return for one of gaming's most beloved franchises. We take a closer look at how it all came together: the momentum that built before launch, the impact it made on release, and what it tells us about one of horror gaming's most enduring fandoms.

We then deep-dive into the broader horror gaming creator ecosystem in the last year across Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok. We explore story-driven franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, to social co-op "friendslop" hits like R.E.P.O., to giants like Dead by Daylight. Here's what we found:

Key Findings

• Requiem is the #1 game launch on Twitch in both 2026 and 2025 — across all genres. Peaking at 619K concurrent viewers on Twitch, Requiem was fueled by an active community that never stopped playing Resident Evil games even between releases.
• Twitch is horror's home base. The platform generated 43.2M horror viewer hours in the last year — but horror's viral potential on YouTube Shorts (13B+ views) and TikTok, paired with the narrative deep-dives and guides thriving on YouTube VODs, means every format has a role to play.
• Horror is a viewership magnet for bigger creators. Fans love watching big personalities get scared when live, 60% of "mega-sized" Twitch creators see a viewership boost from horror. Small and mid-sized creators are the genre's backbone who specialize and drive the bulk of viewer and stream hours.
• Horror is a variety genre, but specializing can pay off (especially on YouTube). Specialists make up just 17% of horror creators but drive 32% of viewer hours on Twitch. YouTube also rewards specialization (more than on Twitch), with many top creators making their name by committing fully to horror, rather than treating it as a dip-in genre.
• Horror fans are 9x more likely to play a dating sim. Horror fans crave storytelling, lore, and narrative. Horror creators over-index on dating sims (9×), point-and-click adventures (6×), and visual novels (5×), signaling an audience that wants rich characters and worlds, not just jump scares.
• Geography matters for horror. While NA and EU dominate overall viewership, Japan and Argentina emerge as standout horror markets with outsized horror engagement relative to their size.

Resident Evil Requiem's Twitch Takeover

Requiem stands as the #1 game launch on Twitch — not just in 2026, but across all of 2025 too

Peaking at over 619K concurrent viewers (CCV) on its release, Requiem shattered the 600K CCV barrier on Twitch, surpassing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (478K CCV), Monster Hunter Wilds (408K), and the launch day of giants like Battlefield 6 (588K) and Arc Raiders (375K).

Requiem’s Rise to the Top Began Before It Even Dropped

Starting in October 2025, the legacy Resident Evil catalog never dipped below 50K daily viewer hours and maintained 3K+ creators streaming it every day. In the days leading up to Requiem's launch, the Resident Evil back catalog was even outperforming Dead by Daylight — one of Twitch's biggest horror mainstays — generating over 400K daily viewer hours before Requiem even dropped.

For a lineup of older titles, this kind of sustained engagement for Resident Evil  is extraordinary — driven by a dedicated community, active modding scenes, and an endless appetite for challenge runs.

Remarkably, Requiem's massive launch still couldn't top Resident Evil Village's 2021 debut on Twitch, underscoring just how massive the franchise has been for years (though Requiem did outpace Resident Evil 4 and rivals like Silent Hill and Dead Space).

Resident Evil's Persistent Dominance in the Horror Creator Ecosystem

Over the past year, the Resident Evil franchise generated more than 41.9 million viewer hours on Twitch — accounting for nearly 10% of all horror viewer hours on the platform (and that's not even including Requiem content yet). Both Resident Evil 2 and 4 made it in the top 10 horror games on Twitch. This is a remarkable achievement for a franchise whose last mainline release was in 2021, with the most recent entry being the Resident Evil 4 remake in 2023.

When excluding multiplayer and party-style horror titles (such as Dead by Daylight and R.E.P.O.), Resident Evil accounts for roughly 30% of total horror viewer hours on Twitch.

Resident Evil Succeeds Across Content Forms

Resident Evil's cultural footprint extends well beyond live streaming. Across Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok, a Resident Evil game ranked in the top 10 horror games regardless of platform or content type.

When measured by post volume, Resident Evil broke into the Top 3 horror franchises on both YouTube VODs (long-form) and TikTok — demonstrating its versatility as a content engine.

The franchise thrives equally in long-form formats (guides, lore deep-dives, full playthroughs) and short-form content (cosplay, memes, fan edits), a testament to the depth and passion of its fanbase.

Lessons From Requiem's Massive Launch

What makes Requiem's launch so compelling isn't just the peak launch day stats, it's the story behind them. A franchise with no new release since 2021 maintained top-10 horror status across every major platform for an entire year. That kind of retention is rare in gaming, and it speaks to a community that doesn't just play Resident Evil — they live in it. With fans flocking back to older Resident Evil titles in the two months before launch, Requiem was able to arrive with explosive momentum.

That sustained fan devotion is exactly what propelled Requiem to the #1 spot on Twitch on launch day — briefly surpassing even the "Just Chatting" category — making it one of the biggest game debuts across 2025 and 2026 in terms of concurrent viewers.

Understanding the Horror Creator Ecosystem

Requiem's dominance didn't happen in a vacuum. It's part of a horror creator ecosystem that is one of gaming's most passionate communities. We analyzed horror gaming content across Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok in the year leading up to Requiem's launch, and here's what we found.

Where does horror content live?

Horror content thrives on every major platform, but Twitch wins by far. The genre pulled 43.2M viewer hours in the last year with over 2.5M creators streaming at least one piece of horror content. YouTube long-form follows with 501K creators.

Although YouTube Shorts has the fewest horror creators (221K), its superpower is its viral potential: jump scares, clippable reacts, and chaos moments fuel massive short-form reach, with over 13B views on YouTube Shorts.

Our past research confirms that horror performs especially well in short-form, with shorter VOD times coinciding with better viewership. Still, while Shorts delivers viral spikes, the most reliable volume of horror content and creators lives on Twitch.

Horror Game Preferences Split Sharply by Platform

The top 10 horror games on Twitch reveal a genre defined by two forces: beloved single-player mega-franchises and social multiplayer experiences.

Dead by Daylight is the runaway leader — not just on Twitch but across TikTok, YouTube VODs, and Shorts, demonstrating its cross-platform mainstream appeal.

Co-op, "friend-slop" and multiplayer titles (R.E.P.O., Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, The Outlast Trials) reinforce that horror streaming is also an overtly social experience. But the presence of Silent Hill and Resident Evil in the top 10 speaks to the enduring power of these narrative-driven, lore-rich worlds. Subnautica at #10 shows that horror-adjacent titles pull horror audiences too — genre boundaries are blurry.

YouTube VOD/Long-Form — Top Horror Games Feb 2025—Feb 2026:

• Most views: Choo-Choo Charles (1.3B views, driven by viral outliers /top creators playing it/appeal to children), Dead by Daylight (842M views), R.E.P.O. (683M views)
• Most content: Dead by Daylight (567K videos), R.E.P.O. (206K videos), Resident Evil 4 (154K videos) — reflecting the value of guides, playthroughs, and lore deep-dives that don't translate as well to short-form

YouTube Shorts — Top Horror Games Feb 2025—Feb 2026:

• Most views: Poppy Playtime (4.1B views), Five Nights at Freddy's (1.7B views), Gorilla Tag (1.2B views). These games all skew towards younger audiences and thrive in short-form format with views in the billions.
• Most content: Gorilla Tag (187K videos), Dead by Daylight (149K videos), R.E.P.O. (132K videos)

TikTok — Top Horror Games Feb 2025—Feb 2026:

• Dead by Daylight, Resident Evil, and Five Nights at Freddy's lead the pack in terms of content volume on TikTok
• FNAF tops views thanks to TikTok's Gen-Z demographic, with Silent Hill and Resident Evil rounding out the top 3, fueled by fandom expression on the platform (think cosplay, character fan edits, and more)

What creator size dominates horror?

Horror viewership on Twitch is shaped by a tension between volume and reach.

• Nano creators drive the most total viewer hours (172M) because there are so many of them. Horror also makes up a disproportionately large share of their content — roughly 6% of nano viewer hours come from horror, nearly double the platform average of 3%.
• Mid and large creators together drive more horror viewer hours (271M) than nano creators alone, thanks to their balance of volume and individual reach. On average, micro, mid, and large creators also dedicate the most average stream hours per creator to horror, making them the genre's workhorse tiers.
• Roughly 25% of mega creators have played at least one horror game in the past year — 2x more likely than other creator tiers — and while they sample widely (a median of 5 horror games a year versus just 1 for nano creators), they contribute fewer total stream and viewer hours, suggesting breadth over commitment.

When does horror boost viewership?

Horror Benefits Larger Creator Viewership the Most

Relative to other streamed genres, mega creators see the most reliable ACV boost when streaming horror. 60% of mega creators get a boost when streaming horror relative to other genres (with this median boost being 2.1%). The appeal is intuitive — audiences love watching big personalities get scared live on stream. Mid and micro creators typically take a 4–6% ACV hit when switching to horror. Nano creators' viewership doesn't move much (typically because they only have a few viewers at a time).

Horror specialization depends on creator size and platform

• Specialist Creator: stream >70% horror games
• Explorer Creator: stream 30-70% horror games
• Variety Creator: stream <30% horror games

Every mega creator on Twitch who streams horror is a variety streamer. On YouTube, however, the top 5 mega horror creators span all content types — specialists, explorers, and variety alike.

This suggests that specializing in horror may pay off differently depending on the platform: on YouTube, a creator can build a massive audience as a horror specialist, while on Twitch, horror appears to be a genre that even the biggest creators only dip into as part of a broader mix of content.

Smaller creators are more likely to specialize in horror.

Horror Is a Variety Genre, But Specialists Are Rewarded

Horror is not a specialist genre in the way that other genres are (like FPS, sports/racing, fighting games):

• 55% of horror creators are variety streamers (<30% horror content)
• 29% are explorers
• ~17% (~55K creators) are specialists (70%+ horror content)
• Several specialists commit to only a single game (mostly Dead by Daylight)

Horror viewership is largely driven by variety streamers, but specialists punch far above their weight. Despite making up just 17% of horror creators, they account for 32% of total viewer hours and drive the strongest ACV lifts across every size tier — making them high-value targets for horror game marketing.

What else are horror creators playing?

What do horror creators play when they're not playing horror? To find out, we looked at Twitch creators who had horror as their primary genre and logged at least 25 hours of horror content in the past year.

Top 5 Secondary Genres Among Horror Creators on Twitch (by Number of Creators)

1. Adventure (63K creators, 3.9M stream hours)
2. Action adventure (62K creators, 3.6M stream hours)
3. Survival (62K creators, 8.3M stream hours)
4. Strategy (59K creators, 7.1M stream hours)
5. Puzzle (5K, 1.9M stream hours)

Where horror creators dramatically over-index vs. the average Twitch streamer:

• Dating sims: ~9× more likely to play
• Point-and-click adventures: ~6× more likely
• Visual novels: ~5× more likely

Importantly, this trend extends beyond a few crossover titles — it could explain the cult followings behind games like Doki Doki Literature Club!, Danganronpa, Corpse Party, and Slay the Princess, which blend horror with these other genres. Even after excluding games tagged as both horror and point-and-click (or visual novel), the effect holds true. This suggests something key about the horror demographic: these are audiences and creators who value narrative, lore, storytelling, and world-building, not just jump scares. They skew toward niche, story-driven genres, pointing to a community more open to unconventional gaming experiences than the Twitch mainstream.

Compared to the average Twitch streamer, horror creators are the least likely to play sports or auto-battler/tower defense games, suggesting minimal creator and audience overlap between horror and these genres.

Understanding what other genres horror gamers enjoy (and do not enjoy) helps marketers identify target audiences and reveals the gameplay features — such as lore, narrative, and storytelling — that resonate most with them.

Global Market Research: Where the Scares Come From

Other Twitch Market Insights

• Core-English Markets Dominate Horror on Twitch. Across core English-speaking markets — the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia — Twitch creators over-index on horror, with a higher share of streamers playing the genre and dedicating more broadcast hours to it than the global average (roughly 10–30% above average depending on the country).
• LATAM's Horror Scene Is Bigger Than You Think. Brazil ranked in the Top 5 horror countries on Twitch in terms of raw viewer hours and engagement. Argentina also stands out as a horror powerhouse. Argentine creators dedicate 40% more of their streaming time to horror than the global average, and horror accounts for 12.9% of all viewer hours on Argentine streams — compared to roughly 3% platform-wide. That means Argentina generates 4.4x more horror viewer hours relative to the global average. Notable creators like AgustinUnaplay8 (primarily Dead by Daylight streamer) highlight the genre's strength in the region.

YouTube

Top 5 Countries YT VOD (Long-Form): US, Japan, India, UK, Brazil

Other YouTube Market Insights

• Japan has the highest share of horror content creators on YouTube. Nearly a third of Japanese creators create long-form horror content — the highest horror adoption rate of all countries in the dataset. On Shorts, Japan also leads with a creator index of 1.5x (50% more Japanese creators make horror content than the global average). It's a fitting reflection of the country's deep roots in the genre, having produced some of gaming's most beloved horror franchises.
• Pakistan and India as “viral” horror markets on YouTube. Pakistan leads with the highest horror views index (4.7x) and 243M+ Shorts views, despite only 2.6% of its creators making horror content. India tells a similar story: low creator penetration, yet a top-five ranking for total horror viewer hours, suggesting a handful of creators are driving outsized, viral impact.

TERMINOLOGY.

Twitch Creator size tiers (by Average Concurrent Viewers):

• Mega: 10K+ ACV
• Large: 1K–10K ACV
• Mid: 100–1K ACV
• Micro: 25–100 ACV
• Nano: <25 ACV

YouTube Creator size tiers (by Average Views Per VOD):

• Mega: 150K+ AVV
• Large: 50–150K AVV
• Mid: 5–50K AVV
• Small: 1–5K AVV
• Nano: <1K AVV

Cohort Definitions

• Specialist: 70%+ of content is horror
• Explorer: 30-70% of content is horror
• Variety: <30% of content is horror

Last week, Twitch’s new detection system for viewbotting went live. Most headlines stopped at the topline: “Twitch lost 20% of its viewership overnight.” That number is technically accurate, but incomplete.

When we dug deeper into the data, a more nuanced picture emerged...

What we measured

Instead of stopping at the topline, we ran a controlled analysis:

• Compared the last 30 days pre-crackdown vs. the first week post-crackdown
• Controlled for seasonality and day-of-week effects (e.g., comparing Monday vs. previous Mondays, not just raw averages)
• Broke down impact by game ecosystem, creator density, and peak vs. off-peak hours

Key Findings

Context matters.

• On average, Twitch viewership fell ~18% per day, but the impact wasn’t uniform across the platform.

Creator ecosystems matter.

• Games with many active creators (League, Valorant, CS, Dota) saw only modest changes. Their ecosystems are statistically resilient because no single channel dominates.
  
  
• Games with fewer creators experienced much sharper declines. Smaller ecosystems are more fragile, and easier to distort with botted audiences.

Timing matters.

• Weekends showed the steepest drops. Bot activity historically peaks during high-traffic windows, when competition for visibility is greatest.

Genre matters.

• Competitive / hardcore titles proved the most resilient.
• Casual and mid-tier titles had the highest percentage of creators with declines, making discoverability in these segments easier to skew under inflated viewership.
  

What this means for marketers

The crackdown is just one round in an ongoing bot farm arms race. Platforms plug holes, botters adapt, and the cycle repeats. Analytics platforms are racing to flag anomalies. That’s useful, but if you’re solely prioritizing bot traffic in your decision making process you’ll likely be chasing diminishing returns.

At Gamesight, we go deeper:

• We don’t just look at views, we connect them to clicks, installs, and revenue.
• Because we tie creators to attribution data, it’s often immediately obvious when inflated viewership isn’t driving downstream action.

Certain communities appear to be more subject to bot traffic, so it's important to take a holistic approach to your marketing (looking for broad audience receptiveness, targeting cohorts, etc.) and have ways of measuring success beyond "viewers."

Creators play a pivotal role across the entire game lifecycle, from providing early feedback and driving launch-day excitement to sustaining long-term community engagement. Choosing the wrong creators can undermine all of that. Using data to guide creator selection is just as important as choosing the right event format. But not all creator events are created equal. Choosing the wrong type of event at the wrong time can drain your budget, slow momentum, and lead to missed opportunities.

This guide breaks down the three most common types of creator events: Playtests, Content Creation Events, and Creator Connection Events, and shows you how to align each one with the right phase of your game’s development.

🎯 Start with Your Goal

Use this cheat sheet to match your campaign objective to the right kind of creator event:

🧩 Match Events to Development Phases

EARLY DEVELOPMENT (Pre-Alpha → Pre-Beta)

Primary Focus: Insight + Actionable Feedback

Best Event Types:

• Creator Council
  A small, recurring group of creators who give input on art, narrative, UI/UX, and tone. Ideal for building early advocates and catching friction points early.
  
  
• Virtual Playtests
  Early Steam builds + written feedback or roundtables. Scalable and cost-efficient for capturing input across regions or time zones.
  
  IRL Playtests
  In-person gameplay sessions paired with developer interviews and observation. Great for high-touch insights and trust-building.
  

✅ Why It Works:
At this stage, creators help shape the game, not just play it. These events bring the voice of the creator into development decisions before they become marketing challenges.

PRE-LAUNCH (Late Beta → Release Window)

Primary Focus: Awareness + Content Creation

Best Event Types:

• Preview Events
  Invite creators to play early builds under embargo and produce launch-aligned content (videos, streams, social). Paid or incentivized with clear deliverables.
  
  
• Creative Marketing Activations
  Studio visits, experiential campaigns, or content shoots where the creator’s likeness is used in marketing materials. Think hype trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, or co-branded spots.
  
  ✅ Why It Works:
  You’ve moved from building to promoting. This is where creators become your amplification engine.

POST-LAUNCH / LIVE SERVICE

Primary Focus: Retention + Relationship

Best Event Types:

• Creator Happy Hours / IRL Socials
  Casual, social gatherings (at conferences or standalone) that deepen relationships and make creators feel valued beyond a campaign.
  
  
• Virtual Meetups, Dev AMAs, or Discord Sessions
  Ongoing touchpoints that keep creators in the loop and feeling like insiders — even when there’s no new beat.
  
  

✅ Why It Works:
You’re playing the long game. These events build sentiment and community momentum that money can’t buy.

Quick Comparison

The most successful creator marketing strategies aren’t just about running events, they’re about choosing the right event at the right moment to support the right objective.

If you're building your creator GTM strategy, ask:

• Are we gathering feedback or generating awareness?
• Do we need measurable ROI or long-term sentiment?
• Is this about a campaign or a relationship?

📣 Let’s Build Your Creator Event Strategy

At Gamesight, we help studios design and execute creator strategies tailored to each development phase and beyond. From early playtests to post-launch parties, we use data-driven creator events to connect creators and brands in ways that drive results.

You cannot measure what you cannot see. Cost aggregation is the core of Gamesight’s Marketing Intelligence Hub and is critical for measurement, along with attribution and incrementality.

It gives you the financial clarity needed to make smart decisions across the entire game lifecycle. From early awareness campaigns to launch, and even 5 years into post-launch support, cost aggregation shows exactly what you spent, where you spent it, and when.

❌ Without Cost Aggregation:

• Spend data is scattered across platforms and formats
• Key metrics like CPI and ROAS are harder to calculate or less precise
• Attribution and incrementality insights may be based on incomplete spend visibility

✅ With Cost Aggregation:

• All spend is centralized into a clean, structured dataset across channels
• Campaign metrics are easier to track and compare in real time
• Budget decisions are informed by a full financial picture
• Attribution can be paired with precise cost inputs for a clearer view of performance
• Incrementality testing is grounded in comprehensive spend data for deeper insight

Cost aggregation is not just a backend process. It is the starting point for every smart, scalable, and measurable growth strategy in the games industry.

How Cost Aggregation benefits each stage of your game:

🛠️Pre-Launch

Challenge

• Difficulty reporting on key engagement metrics for early awareness campaigns, trailer drops, and wishlist/pre-order pushes across ad networks and platforms.
• Fragmented reports lack a consistent structure and language.

Solution

• Gamesight’s Cost Aggregation can accept reports from any platform and flexibly map them into a standard format.
• Standardize dimensions (e.g., campaign name, geography, creative type) and unify cost schemas across partners.

Outcome

• Easily generate spend and conversion analysis across all media and gaming platforms, side-by-side, in a single report.
• More consistent pre-launch reporting enables better media planning for launch.
• Creates cleaner, more reliable cost accounting for your critical awareness efforts without duplication of effort.

🚀 Launch

Challenge

• Ad spend spikes across multiple networks and agencies, but reporting is inconsistent, late, or double-counted.
• Siloed cost data makes CPI and ROAS difficult to calculate or inaccurate.
• It takes too much time to aggregate all your reporting across platforms, limiting how often you can review the current status of your campaigns.

Solution

• Centralize all marketing spend into a single, standardized dashboard (including programmatic, influencer, social, search, CTV and more).
• With cost and conversion measurement, Gamesight can automatically calculate metrics like CPI and ROAS for you.
• Gamesight keeps up-to-date with all your spend through APIs and automated email ingestion, giving you precise, updated reporting through our dashboard or Reporting API.

Outcome

• Get access to rich reporting across all platforms at the most critical moment of your game’s lifecycle.
• Delivers the true cost of acquisition, enabling conversion measurement to be properly contextualized.
• Give confident and accurate answers to executives on the holistic state of your marketing.

🔁 Expand & Retain

Challenge

• Ongoing campaign, retention, and experimentation costs pile up across a growing number of networks, but are not tracked equally or consistently.
• LTV and retention metrics are disconnected from the cost to sustain them.
• Long-term modeling and projection is impossible without consistent cost accounting.

Solution

• Gamesight is constantly expanding API support across 100+ networks with automated email support to close the gap with less capable ad networks.
• Automatically calculated efficiency metrics neatly contextualize long-term performance metrics
• Consistently tie spend and conversions to specific time windows, segments, or cohorts.

Outcome

• You can confidently expand and experiment with new networks knowing that it will be supported by Gamesight.
• Enables long-term performance analysis, like LTV, to be grounded in cost-efficiency metrics like CPI or cost-per-reactivation.
• Unlocks the possibility of sophisticated financial modeling and performance analysis with confidence.
  

To demonstrate the true value of your marketing campaigns and optimize them for peak performance, it's essential to leverage the right measurement tools. This article dives into two key methodologies—attribution and incrementality—both offering unique insights on their own into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. When used together, they provide a comprehensive view of your campaign impact, empowering you to make more informed, data-driven decisions.

What is Attribution?

Attribution is the process of matching player interactions with your ads to player behavior in your game. It’s a valuable tool that helps you understand which channels and campaigns are driving conversions. By analyzing these interactions, you can optimize your campaigns to target the right audiences and allocate your budget more effectively.

Key Benefits:

• Granular Insights: Attribution provides detailed data on player interactions, allowing you to see which channels, campaigns, and even specific ads are most effective.
• Fast Feedback: It delivers near real-time insights, enabling quick adjustments to campaigns based on performance.
• Ad Spend Optimization: Enables fine-tuned targeting and ad spend by providing ad networks with conversion data, informing them of which audiences or creatives are most effective.
• Comprehensive player Journey Tracking: Captures multiple touchpoints along the player journey, offering a broad view of channel contributions.

Limitations:

• Correlation, Not Causation: Attribution shows correlations, but it can’t tell you if players would have installed your game without seeing the ad.
• Complexity: attribution is an extremely difficult thing to build on your own (without a partner like Gamesight)
• Privacy: requires player-level data processing, more subject to changes in regulation, etc.
• Channel Bias: Attribution models can over emphasize the importance of certain channels that are often used by players who already have intent to play your game. For example, brand keyword search ads often appear to be performing very well from a pure attribution perspective.

What is Incrementality?

Incrementality measures the true causal impact of your marketing campaigns. It answers the critical question: how many new players installed the game because of the campaign, beyond what would have happened organically?

To determine this, “match-market incrementality” testing is a split-test comparison between two similar geographic markets—one that receives the marketing campaign and one that doesn’t. Matched market split tests are valid for any regionally targeted marketing initiative, whether you're running on-console banners, social media retargeting campaigns, or even metro station takeovers.

Why is this important? The key to accurate incrementality testing lies in market selection and defining a baseline. These are the hardest parts of the process because they require advanced statistical analysis and are subject to many influences and variables. Running successful incremental lift experiments requires that the groups being compared are truly similar, so any differences in performance can be confidently attributed to the campaign. Without careful market selection and a well-defined baseline, the results could be misleading.

🗝️ Key Concepts Explained:

• Match Market Incrementality is a method of measuring the impact of a marketing campaign by comparing results between a test market (with the campaign) and a control market (without it).
• Market Selection: Picking similar areas or groups to compare in a marketing test. It helps ensure that any changes are due to the campaign, not other behavioral differences.
• Baseline: A benchmark of typical performance, set before any new marketing actions. This serves as the basis for measuring the campaign’s added value.
• Lift: The added value from the campaign, seen as the difference in results between the test group and control group. This metric highlights the campaign’s specific impact after a controlled experiment.

Example:

If you run an ad campaign on Facebook, attribution might show tens of thousands of installs following the campaign, but were those installs truly driven by your ads? Incrementality can help you determine whether those installs would have occurred, even without the campaign, giving you a more accurate measure of your campaign’s impact.

Key Benefits:

• Causal Insights: Provides a clearer causal analysis, showing how many conversions were directly driven by your marketing.
• Accuracy in ROI Measurement: Offers a more accurate picture of return on ad spend (ROAS) by revealing the actual revenue lift generated by your campaign
• Effective Budget Allocation: Helps in allocating your budget to strategies that truly drive growth.
• Complementary to Attribution: Refines and validates your marketing strategy when used alongside attribution.

Limitations:

• Less Granularity: Incrementality measures the joint impact of all of your marketing efforts and doesn’t provide the same level of line-item level insights as attribution.
• Longer Feedback Loops: Requires weeks or months to gather meaningful data, resulting in slower feedback.
• Limited Simultaneous Testing: You can generally only run one incrementality test at a time, limiting the ability to test multiple variables or channels concurrently.
• Costs: Incrementality testing can be expensive, requiring significant investment to achieve meaningful results. Additionally, it is often complex to execute, typically necessitating the expertise of a data analyst to ensure accurate and actionable insights.

Knowing when to look beyond Attribution

Attribution is a powerful tool for tracking player interactions and understanding which channels are driving conversions. However, there are critical moments when attribution alone isn't enough, and you need to look beyond it to incrementality:

• Proving Causal Impact:
  Attribution shows which channels are clicked or viewed prior to conversion, but it doesn't tell you if those players would have converted anyway. Incrementality reveals the true lift caused by your marketing.
• Measurement Beyond Ad Clicks
  Some types of marketing efforts aren’t easily measurable through user-level attribution. Influencer campaigns, out-of-home (OOH), or even impression measurement on traditionally restrictive ad networks are opportunities for incremental measurement.
• Privacy-safe
  Data sharing for user-level measurement can be challenging for some organizations. Running A/B tests with an ad network often means sharing sensitive PII. Attribution requires using user-level data for matching. Incremental measurement can work with aggregate data and doesn’t require data sharing with ad networks – a much safer option for publishers with highly restrictive privacy standards.
• Optimizing Between Key Campaign Beats:
  For GaaS (Games as a Service) titles, the value of incrementality testing lies in optimizing evergreen campaigns. Since marketing for GaaS is often continuous, incrementality can be applied during quieter periods between key beats (e.g., DLC launches). These in-between windows offer an ideal opportunity for matched-market tests without impacting major promotional moments, allowing insights to be gathered that can then be applied to drive more efficient spend and engagement during larger, high-stakes campaigns.

Why Use Both Together?

Attribution and incrementality are complementary tools that, when used together, provide a comprehensive understanding of your marketing efforts. Attribution delivers detailed, player-level insights into which campaigns drive in-game behavior, making it ideal for optimizing campaigns with fast or automated feedback loops. It allows you to compare targeting, creative, and channels to ensure your budget is focused where it has the highest impact.

Incrementality, on the other hand, helps you understand whether a channel—or even your entire marketing strategy—is driving an overall return. Since many users see ads without clicking, incrementality testing—such as match market testing for networks lacking impression tracking (e.g., Facebook and Google Ads)—reveals the true lift your marketing generates beyond organic behavior. Incrementality demonstrates the causal impact of your marketing efforts by measuring lift over your organic baseline.

Most providers only offer either attribution or incrementality, not both, meaning you need two separate tools, which can be costly and complex to manage. However, Gamesight uniquely integrates both solutions into one platform, simplifying the process and reducing costs. This dual approach allows you to confidently allocate resources, validate your strategies, and achieve a deeper understanding of how each component of your marketing contributes to overall growth. The combination of user-level attribution and incrementality enhances marketing insights and drives better decision-making for long term growth.

Take the Next Step:

Reach out to your Gamesight representative today to learn how Incrementality can help you make more data-driven marketing decisions.

For many streamers, establishing a loyal following starts with specializing in a particular video game or type of content. When these streamers switch from their main content to explore new opportunities, they often encounter challenges such as significant viewer drop-offs. This presents a considerable risk for companies looking to work with creators to promote new games - unexpected audience drop-offs during sponsored content can turn a great collaboration into a bad deal for both the sponsor and creator.

In this article, we will delve into the reasons behind viewer drop-offs when streamers switch titles and explore trends that can assist in predicting the magnitude of these drop-offs or avoid them altogether! By identifying the key predictors of audience drop-off, we can select creators with audiences more likely to be engaged or excited to see new content. Doing so allows you to run the best-performing campaigns while building strong relationships with creators and their communities.

Should you Market Candyland to Chess Players?

To begin, we will look into the impact of genre on audience drop-off. When an influencer marketing team searches for the most suitable creators for their titles, they often focus on fanbases of various related genres. This strategy makes sense at first glance as it ensures the selection of creators with a proven track record of success in those target audiences. These teams run into trouble when they assume that a creator's audience will automatically transition to a new game simply because it's similar. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

So, which genres tend to possess the most stubborn audiences? Which genres contain viewers who are more open to new content?  To understand how audience drop-off varies between game genres, we looked at focused creators (those who create 50% or more of their content from one game) and analyzed their audience drop-off when they switched to any other game.

Upon review, one theme sticks out immediately: barrier to entry. Genres with high drop-off, such as real-time strategy (RTS), are often perceived as challenging to engage with, requiring a significant time commitment compared to others. As such, these are usually difficult games for building a loyal fanbase.

By comparison, the low drop-off genres have games that are fairly easy to understand or require little time to learn the fundamental gameplay mechanics. They are also typically marketed towards a more casual player who doesn’t have hours of time to play a session. Another noticeable trait is length of play. Many higher drop-off games involve long, arduous sessions by necessity, but the lower drop-off games are either more relaxed or extremely quick, round-to-round.

Surprisingly, genre popularity doesn’t seem to have much impact on audience drop-off. Games from niche genres like puzzle, gacha, RTS, and auto-battlers were found in both the best- and worst-performing segments. Similarly, popular genres like FPS, Battle Royale, and MMOs were also found in both the top- and bottom-performing groups.

When judging a game’s “stickiness” what truly matters is the investment required to understand. Individuals who engage with content related to RTS or MMORPGS are typically deeply knowledgeable and dedicated to these games. They likely go to a creator primarily for their expertise in the game rather than their personality. After all, if you’re in a seminar with a famous biologist, you likely don’t want to hear the expert talk about the French Revolution. This is not intended to dissuade you from promoting one of these games on Twitch. It's simply highlighting the increased importance of choosing creators with engaged audiences rather than solely informed audiences.

What About Marketing Checkers to Chess Players?

Above, we looked at generalized cases but have yet to get specific. Of course, conventional wisdom would tell us that a World of Warcraft audience would likely not care to see Fortnite, but what about…another MMO? One seemingly intuitive approach to promoting a new game involves selecting an individual who heavily engages with a game in the same genre as theirs. Is this always a good strategy?

Here are some examples of focused creators’ main titles and subsequent viewership drop-offs when creators switch to games within the same genre:

While these are just a few examples, these are some titles that are often used as the “go-to” of their genres. On average, the results of using creators who mainly play these games are disastrous! Choosing creators who excel in similar games is essential, but it's just as important to choose creators who can excel in multiple games within that genre rather than just one in which they may be seen as a paragon.

How Much is Too Much?

You can see that exclusively targeting the pillar of a specific genre isn’t the best approach. Next, you should consider whether the creator’s share of content on a game becomes more of a burden than a benefit. The graph below shows how viewership reacts to a creator switching off their primary title. We grouped creators by how much of their content is dedicated to their primary game. For example, on average, a creator with 60% of their content dedicated to their primary title would see a 10% drop-off when switching off their primary game.

You can see a negative trend between primary content share and viewership change when switching games. Variety creators don't experience the same drop-off as the focused creators- they actually see an increase in viewership. This is likely because viewers want to see new content rather than revisited content when watching variety creators. When most of your content is dedicated to one game, viewers become increasingly demanding of that consistency. This could be because viewers begin to see focused creators as subject matter experts and come to them specifically for their opinions on their title of choice.

Notably, creator size doesn’t significantly impact these numbers, meaning influencer program managers can leverage this principle whether their campaign budget is $10,000 or $1,000,000.

Suppose the goal of your influencer marketing campaign is to minimize viewer drop-off and reach as many viable targets for your title as possible. In that case, we recommend selecting creators whose content is not heavily concentrated on one particular game. Viewers who are receptive to trying out new games tend to follow influencers for their personal preferences rather than their expert knowledge of a specific franchise. Hiring a franchise expert to promote your new game is a lot like asking a surgeon to treat your sore throat. People rely on them for their expertise in their field rather than for their comprehensive knowledge.

It's important for creators you work with to effectively communicate and differentiate the unique aspects of the game compared to all of your competitors. By ensuring that creators have less than half of their content dedicated to one game, you can minimize risks and focus on targeting the most suitable influencer audiences for your campaign. As the concentration on a single game exceeds 50%, the level of risk escalates rapidly. We advise putting your marketing in the hands of the general practitioners of gaming out there.

In conclusion, when selecting creators for your influencer campaign, it's crucial to consider the content choice and the diversity of content they can offer. Striking a balance between targeted game content and broad appeal can be challenging. Still, it’s essential to recognize the value of an audience receptive to a wide range of content a creator promotes. It’s entirely okay to market Candyland to Chess players; just make sure those Chess players also have a bit of Guess Who, Shoots and Ladders, and so on in their content!

This roundtable at PGC London, brought together thought-leaders from Gamesight, Nexus, Titan Forge Games. Dan Laughlin, Justin Sacks, and Stephen Hutchins provided profound insights into "Content Creator Programs - The Hidden Secret for Mobile Growth & Monetization," underscoring the significance of these partnerships in elevating game growth and player engagement.

🔑Key strategies highlighted include:

Identify and Partner with Creators Aligned with Your Game.

Look for content creators whose audience matches your target demographic. This alignment ensures that your game reaches potential players in a way that feels authentic and engaging. Publishers like Capcom and Epic utilize Gamesight’s proprietary platform for their ongoing content creator activations to not only vet applicants, but also to power ongoing data-driven outreach to creators with in-target audiences.

Develop a Reward System for Creators.

Implement an incentive program where creators receive a share of the revenue from in-game purchases made by their audience. This not only motivates creators to produce more content but also aligns their success with yours.

Create Channels for Direct Feedback.

Establish direct lines of communication between your development team and content creators. This could involve exclusive updates, Q&A sessions, or feedback loops that allow creators to provide insights from the community, ultimately enhancing the game’s development and content strategy. SMITE’s creator program focuses on rewarding both consistent and ad-hoc content creators, facilitating direct communication between creators and developers to improve content quality and strengthen community bonds.

Utilize Tools for Program Management.

Invest in tools and platforms that facilitate the management of your creator program. This includes tracking engagements, managing payouts, and analyzing the program’s impact on your game’s growth metrics.

Leverage Key Game Milestones.

SMITE uses significant updates or game launches as opportunities to attract and engage with new content creators. Offering exclusive access or special promotions during these times can help capture the attention of both creators and their audiences.

Signs of a Successful Creator Community.

Focus on building long-term relationships with creators, encouraging them to explore and promote multiple titles within your portfolio. A thriving creator community outpaces typical streamer outputs by over 50%, fostering lasting relationships that lead to multi-game engagement and cross-game audience pollination, with 70% of in-program creators engaging with two or more titles.

🔗 For those who missed it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3BLiR8P5GU

PC and console publishers have long struggled to find and leverage actionable performance data for digital advertising ampaigns. The black-box nature of distribution platforms like Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation has traditionally left publishers with no reliable way to measure which marketing efforts are actually delivering the results they care about.

Some publishers with strong first-party relationships with their players through account systems and email newsletters have developed restricted solutions by working with ad platforms in a self-attributing capacity to recover small amounts of reporting on the performance of their campaigns. However, the cost of maintaining these integrations is high, and the reporting is severely limited. So, what’s the ultimate value marketers can garner from this type of measurement? Unfortunately, often much less than the effort publishers put in.

PC and console publishers have been getting the short end of the stick for too long. By understanding the limitations of working directly with ad platforms in a self-attributing capacity and ultimately taking control of better measurement solutions, marketing teams can leverage their first-party relationship with players using tools they own to get the insights they deserve from their media spend – all at a significantly reduced operational cost.

What is a Self-Attributing Platform?

Many ad platforms have the capability to process conversion data from advertisers to optimize campaigns. This has long been available for events occurring on websites or in mobile apps, but increasingly platforms are rolling out support for "offline conversions" as well. Offline conversions are especially useful for events that occur outside the reach of a standard pixel – installs, and in-game purchases are perfect examples of these types of events. These actions aren’t happening on your website that you can measure with your Meta pixel; they’re happening on separate platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, etc.) that are inaccessible by ad network measurement tools.

Ad platforms, like Meta, Google, and others, will try to attribute these “offline conversions” and tell you how many installs or purchases they were responsible for driving. This is what it means to work with a ad platform in a “self-attributing” capacity – they are measuring themselves directly. To make this machine go, you have to move the conversion data from your game to the ad platforms (often via bespoke Conversion APIs) for analysis.

This is often the crux of the problem for many advertisers in gaming. How do I, as a game marketer, move conversion data from a game to an ad platform somewhere else? What information do I need to provide to make this thing even work? Do I even have the required data? Is the answer to that question true across all of my players or only some? Is the data I’m going to get back worth all this effort?

Sampling Bias, Audience Constraints, and Other Horrors

A major limiting factor to this whole system is the data point(s) required for the ad platform to match against. For our industry, this value is almost always the email address (Facebook, Google, and others will ask for phone numbers, first & last names, mailing addresses, and more details, but this information simply isn’t used or generally available within gaming). Typically, email address collection is a limited practice across gaming advertisers. Most aren’t collecting them, and publishers that are engaging with users in this way still have poor email coverage as a proportion of their total player base.

The problem gets worse when you consider when and how emails are collected from players. The two common entry points for this process are:

1. Website interactions
2. In-game interactions

Through account registrations and login events on these platforms, advertisers can build up their 1st party data (for many useful purposes beyond attribution, by the way) and begin sending these conversion signals back to advertisers. The elephant in the room? These flows are almost always optional and aren’t guaranteed to give you the necessary signal at the time of conversion to provide to the ad platform for analysis.

Take an example user who learns of your game from a video campaign you’re running. They see the ad, check out the game on their console, and install it. They’re greeted with a login/register prompt and skip this optional step. Because you didn’t have email at the time of conversion, you don’t have any matching information to send to your ad partners and ultimately lose the opportunity to attribute this conversion.

This problem gets more complex when considering consent frameworks. It’s common to have consent options both for 1st party data collection and 3rd party data-sharing. You can imagine a situation where a user consents to 1st party data collection but refuses to allow their data to be shared with ad networks. There’s no way you’d be able to send this data back to an ad platform for optimization. However, with better measurement tools, you might have been able to attribute this user back to the campaign they interacted with. Instead, by solely relying on the ad networks, any chance for actionable marketing data on this user is gone due to a lack of 3rd party data-sharing consent.

These are players enjoying your game, making in-game purchases, and other great things you’d probably love to learn from and optimize for, but the signal is largely lost. Your effective signal is your hundreds of thousands or millions of monthly active users triggering conversions multiplied by the percentage of players you have emails for at the time of conversion and consent to you sharing this data with external ad partners – you can begin to see the scale of the problem. The percentage of players for whom a publisher has emails, whether it’s 5% or 45%, is the best-case scenario for the volume of users for which you can send conversion data. The effective number is often much less.

Are these users a representative sample of your average user? How does their behavior differ from users for whom you don’t have emails? What marketing strategies are most effective for these different user bases, and which are more valuable? As a marketer, you’re placing hefty bets in the form of multi-million-dollar marketing budgets with limited ability to verify these hypotheses by relying on ad platforms alone. Inevitably, the signals that advertisers can leverage are a modicum of what’s really possible. The conversions that publishers can send back to the ad platforms are a subset of a subset of a subset of real users, and marketers–not the platforms–end up paying the price for less-than-optimal conversion data.

Mixed Messages

When advertisers rely on ad platforms to tell them how many conversions they are responsible for, the picture they get back from their ad partners is strongly biased and incomplete. When we speak with marketers, they’re often surprised to learn that many of the conversions in ad network 1’s reporting include conversions that are likely also being claimed in ad network 2’s reports, and so on.

Why does this happen? These platforms only see their own clicks and impressions – they don’t see what’s happening on other channels you are marketing against and have no incentive to work together to do so. Ultimately, all your network-reported conversions are scoped to the perspective of, ‘Did we ever show an ad to this user within the attribution window?’ – full stop.

This is bad news for anyone who wants to calculate the ROAS of a marketing campaign when you may be counting a single conversion multiple times. Most marketers agree on some form of credit allocation that would say some of these interactions are worth more than others (and some might be worth nothing at all), but this level of insight isn’t possible with self-attributed measurement, leaving marketers with unclear answers on which channels, campaigns, and individual ads they should be optimizing toward.

Whose Data is it Anyway?

Player data is one of the most sensitive pieces of information a publisher possesses. Even publishers with solid identity coverage across their player base often aren’t in love with the idea of sending all of their player data to an ad platform. Sharing this data with 3rd parties, like ad networks, can be problematic (and a complete non-starter for many organizations). Those who can justify and secure permission to send user data to a major ad platform will be greeted with realization that this data-sharing agreement is a one-way street. Ad platforms will happily accept any user data advertisers are willing to share and promptly repay you with… aggregate reporting. Many platforms won’t even provide aggregates until the reporting passes a particular threshold, like the number of conversions or distinct users.

What gives? There’s some historical context here, but ad platforms are incredibly sensitive about their audiences–and for good reason. A big part of why these platforms are some of the largest market cap publicly traded companies in the world is because of the audience they cultivate. Anything that could risk third-parties replicating those audiences is a non-starter. So, for business and privacy reasons, their solution is “always aggregate, all the time,” regardless of the compromises you might have made to get this data in their hands. Such is the price to pay to play this game.

What this means for advertisers is that even if you were getting perfect attribution answers back from these platforms (it shouldn’t be a surprise by this point that you aren’t), the granularity of information if severely limited – you’re getting no insights at the user level. This means that so much of the work to develop that 1st party relationship with your player isn’t able to be used to act on some of the most critical insights like:

• Where are my highest-value players coming from?
• What kinds of messaging speak best to certain players?
• How can I optimally reengage lapsed players with personalized marketing?

We believe that your data is your data. Publishers should be able to leverage insights from their marketing to deliver better player experiences with user-level reporting for high-resolution player insights, CRM enrichment, and long-term behavioral analysis.

The Silent Killer: Operational Costs

Many marketers understand that this data has to move from one place to another. Conceptually, that makes sense, and someone has to do that work, but once that’s done, we’re good, right? If things are feeling a bit too cozy around here, I’m about to tell you that there’s a second elephant in this room.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. These ad platforms are regularly updating and deprecating their Conversions APIs on a monthly or quarterly–not yearly–basis. There are many reasons for this that are not within the scope of this article, but what matters is that you’ve just introduced a developmental and maintenance item for your dev team. These pipes will break; it’s just a matter of when, and often a company’s most precious (see also: expensive) resource, engineering time, is what’s required to keep the data flowing. So, if you thought marketing wasn’t a big enough job, now you’re a product manager, too.

For marketers with access to engineering resources, it’s often a regular struggle to request the resources they need to keep these integrations alive. We’ve seen publishers integrate these pipelines firsthand only to give up because, eventually, the internal operational cost and resource drain can’t be justified anymore. Back to the Wild West.

So, what are Game Marketers to do?

By this point, things are looking pretty bleak. Marketers often feel that while they’re on the wrong end of this deal, it’s still better than nothing, which is true. If you’re only working with one or two networks, don’t have an interest in user-level insights, and are primarily optimizing around web conversions, working with ad platforms directly and even using their measurement tools is an effective solution. However, most marketers we speak to need to measure the performance of their marketing efforts on in-game conversions in an actionable way that enables them to grow their 1st party relationships with their players and make smarter decisions about where they spend their media dollars.

The measurement solutions we provide our customers empower marketers to do what they do best – make great campaigns, connect with potential players, and grow loyal communities – by providing the best attribution possible. We solve the self-attributing network problem by acting as a neutral arbiter between your ads and conversions. Our attribution product shows you this entire user journey and appropriately applies credit according to your preferred attribution model, enabling you better to understand the impact of your advertising throughout the funnel.

Gamesight isn’t limited to a very specific email-based user flow for measurement either. User flows vary immensely, so you should have methods of measurement to match, including, IP-based matching, device graphing, and you can leverage your 1st party relationships with your players by using emails for matching, too. Our robust approach to measurement fills in the gaps that aren’t captured by the data and user flows that the ad platforms’ self-attributing methods are limited to.

But that doesn't mean you have to leave the insights from self-attribution platforms aside. Our customers get the additional benefit of postback support. We build and maintain conversion pipelines across all major ad platforms. Integrate with Gamesight once and you have all automatic data flows for all major self-attributing platforms as well. This enables your team to focus on higher-priority tasks and enables you to focus on running your campaigns as efficiently as possible.

The bottom line is that solely relying on the ad networks to provide you with conversion data is playing the game with one hand tied behind your back. 2023 was one of the biggest years ever for gaming. High-quality games seemed to be released every week, and it was more challenging than ever for individual projects to stand out. Whether 2024 can match the previous year’s results remains to be seen, but the industry is growing and will stay competitive. Marketers must have a comprehensive strategy for measuring their marketing efforts in a way that’s effective and actionable because this game is won by playing smarter, not harder.

Exploring the differences between earned influencer programs within the gaming industry.

Author: Jennifer Zall, Head of Creator Programs at Gamesight

Navigating the world of long-term influencer partnerships in the gaming industry can often feel daunting. With various terms and strategies, it's easy to get lost in the maze. This guide aims to be your compass, offering a clear and concise breakdown of the four primary types of gaming influencer programs. Whether your aim is to elevate a single game or an entire franchise, this guide is tailored to help you identify the program that best aligns with your marketing goals.

In game marketing, terms like "Creator Program," "Ambassador Program," or "Affiliate Program" are sometimes used interchangeably, leading to confusion. A clear understanding of each is crucial for an informed influencer marketing strategy.

Creator Program

The primary objective of a creator program is to establish and grow a vibrant community of creators. Its key characteristics include leveraging a diverse group of creators that encompass a wide range of creator sizes and demographics and providing an open application system for creators to demonstrate their fit.

Creator programs are best suited for publishers, developers, or brands with multiple game titles, or large game IPs requiring ongoing support.

Benefits:

• Boosts baseline content quality. Average concurrent viewership for Gamesight run programs typically increases over 70% among in-program creators.
• Facilitates gathering community sentiment and feedback.
• Expands audience reach across various game titles and genres. In-program creators exceed typical streamer output by over 50%.
• Promotes diversity and inclusion.
• Amplifies marketing effectiveness through additional communication channels.

Risks:

• Higher commitment translates to increased costs.
• Longer time frame to observe returns due to the need for sustainable growth and engagement.
• Managing a larger group of creators can complicate NDAs and embargoes, though this can be mitigated by activating smaller groups for sensitive topics.
  

Ambassador Program

While still growing a community, the main goal of an ambassador program is to build close relationships with influential community thought leaders. This approach engages a select group of influential creators for feedback and messaging, often involving early access opportunities to products or services. These opportunities sometimes require non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to maintain confidentiality and exclusivity.

Ambassador programs are best suited for games in development, including early access titles, ongoing multiplayer titles, or unreleased titles with large followings and high expectations.

Benefits:

• Gathers valuable feedback before public release.
• Drives positive community sentiment and thought leadership when targeted effectively.

Risks:

• Might not yield as significant a content increase compared to a full-scale Creator Program.
  

Affiliate Program

Also known as "Support A Creator Programs", the focus of an affiliate-style program is to encourage creators to sell game copies or in-game items. Creators earn commissions through codes, links, or storefronts.

Affiliate programs can effectively supplement a creator program, particularly if the latter already offers substantial value to its participants. Additionally, integrating directly into the game itself can significantly enhance the effectiveness of an affiliate program.

Benefits:

• Cost-effective
• Low lift after initial setup

Risks:

• Results vary. Depending on their audiences, creators may or may not make a meaningful impact on their income from these programs, even if they are putting substantial effort into promoting.
• The term “affiliate program” often has negative connotations among creators, as it is often perceived as exploitative.
• Usually attracts smaller creators, as larger ones seek more equitable partnerships with guaranteed pay.
• Creators may lose interest if they don't see substantial benefits.
  

Key Mailer/Redemption Service

Key mailer services provide creators with easy access to game keys or codes distributed via email or online key redemption platforms. A key mailer service is suitable for limited budgets or short-term focused titles, particularly single-player games with limited replayability.

Benefits:

• Cost-effective with minimal effort.
• Effective during major marketing campaigns.

Risks:

• Offers only short-term engagement.
• Requires additional marketing to reach creators effectively.
• Doesn't foster long-term relationships with creators.
  

Matching the Right Program with Your Goals

The key to success is aligning the right program with your brand and marketing goals. From the community-oriented Creator Program to the focused touch of an Ambassador Program, each has a role to play in your strategy.

At Gamesight, we specialize in tailoring our approach to the unique narrative and goals of your game. Our team of expert campaign managers and our advanced influencer database enable us to provide insightful and strategic guidance. Let us help you find the perfect fit for your game marketing needs.

The annual games industry ad spend analysis by Gamesight offers a unique perspective based on data from hundreds of the largest gaming brands globally. As a resource with expertise in games digital marketing, Gamesight provides answers to frequently asked questions like, “What are the most effective marketing channels?”

Game publishers are continuously searching for the best methods to optimize marketing spend, and this analysis aims to answer those questions in broad strokes. This report offers an in-depth look at the most popular advertising networks for PC and Console gaming, ranking them using data gathered from the Gamesight engine.

2023 Top Ad Networks

• Meta
• Google Ads
• DV360
• Reddit Ads
• TikTok

Key Findings

1. Publishers are doubling down on 1st party relationships -- and reaping the rewards with better conversion rates.
2. X Stumbles, Tiktok Rises, and Reddit Innovates. These networks made the most noise in 2023.
3. In a crowded field, Free-To-Play conversion rates are up while retention rates are down.

Read the full report:

2023 Games Industry Digital Marketing Spend Analysis

Read the full report

This article uses a tool from Gamesight’s Chat Sentiment Analysis feature. Learn how you can use this feature in your next marketing campaign: https://blog.gamesight.io/product-feature-chat-sentiment-analysis/

Gamescom Opening Night Live 2023 featured over 2 hours of game trailer reveals and highly anticipated updates, straight from developers. While many attended the show live in Germany, even more gaming enthusiasts could tune in from the comfort of their homes on livestreaming platforms like Twitch.tv.

In examining Gamescom's Opening Night Live show, we crunched the Twitch livestream data through our advanced chat analysis capabilities to find out what segments resonated with the audience.

Scroll on for more!

Gamescom's 2023 show featured 32,394 total messages and over 251K viewer hours.

Worth mentioning is that the “thegameawards” Twitch channel was set to follower-only messages, potentially barring many people from chiming in.

In conjunction with this aggregate timeline view, a powerful capability Gamesight employs is the examination of n-grams, which are any one to n (where n is any number) phrases commonly repeated in chats. It's easy with n-grams to quickly understand what topics were being echoed.

The most repeated n-grams were:

1. "marvel snap" - 164 times
2. "lets go" and variations - 83 times
3. "ara ara" (anime games) - 48 times
4. "elden ring" - 46 times
5. "mortal kombat" - 43 times
6. "alan wake" - 40 times
7. "call duty" - 37 times
8. "silverhand silverhand" (Cyberpunk) - 33 times
9. "max payne" - 32 times
10. "look sick" - 31 times

While this channel was the main broadcast with the most views, many creators on Twitch (even the “gamescom” channel itself) co-streamed the event, splitting the viewership.

Adding together all streams covering the event, Gamescom 2023 had 705K total viewer hours.

These statistics were pulled by looking at Twitch streams tagged with "Gamescom" inside their channel status in the Just Chatting and Special Events categories that started and ended between 18:00 and 21:05 UTC.

A Comparison of 2022 vs. 2023: How Gamescom Won the Industry's Attention

Overall, the quantity of chat engagement has gone down, but viewership by ACV, peak viewers, and viewer hours has actually increased dramatically.

The numbers provide a strong argument that Gamescom appears to have successfully stepped into filling the gap left by E3 when it comes to unveiling game releases.

Viewership has gone up without a parallel increase in chat activity, which may imply the audience has shifted to consist of a majority who are more inclined to follow updates rather than engage in Twitch chat culture.

Gamescom 2022 had 428K total viewer hours, even when considering co-streams, so 2023 still saw an increase of 64.7%.

Additionally, the viewership percentage that co-streams captured decreased from 77.6% to 64.3% year to year. This could indicate how many more viewers knew of Gamescom and watched it on the official channel.

Top 10 Moments Twitch Chat Got Hype For

1. Call of Duty Modern Warfare III: Activision revealed brand new gameplay for the first campaign mission of Modern Warfare 3, dubbed Operation 627. The direct sequel to Modern Warfare 2 will include open campaign missions, the return of slide canceling, and the classic minimap.
2. Rebel Moon Trailer with Zack Snyder: Movie director Zack Snyder made a major guest appearance to debut the trailer for his upcoming sci-fi epic, Rebel Moon, coming to Netflix in two parts. The overwhelming success of his appearance in terms of engagement may indicate that he made a successful connection with the gaming audience.
3. Starfield Piano Performance and Trailer: Starfield released a live-action trailer after an impressive live piano performance by Starfield composer Inon Zur. Director Todd Howard also spoke more about the process of creating Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years.
4. Crimson Desert: From the creators of Black Desert, Pearl Abyss announced their extremely feature-packed game trailer for their newest game, Crimson Desert, impressing viewers.
5. Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty: CD Projekt Red released a new gameplay trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty DLC, and also announced that the Cyberpunk 2.0 updates and improvements would be free for all players.
6. Diablo IV New Season: Diablo IV’s new season, Season of Blood, will add a vampire hunter companion voiced by Gemma Chan. They also announced a new questline, endgame bosses, and other quality-of-life updates.
7. Zenless Zone Zero: HoYoverse announced updates to this brand new title they’re adding to their lineup. Producer Zhenyu Li also appeared on stage to give a glimpse into the game's world.
8. The Last Epoch: Runes of Power: This time travel ARPG revealed a trailer for its newest class, the Runemaster. This game is well-known for having developers who are closely engaged with their player base.
9. Mortal Kombat 1: The creator of Mortal Kombat, Ed Boon, came on stage to reveal four more characters joining the roster with a new gameplay trailer.
10. Tekken 8: Bandai Namco revealed Tekken’s official release date on January 26, 2024, and a gameplay trailer of single-player mode featuring nostalgic old moments and exciting new features.

Employing Gamesight's robust chat analysis tools gives us a powerful understanding of how livestreams spike internet engagement. We’re thrilled to continue to provide comprehensive analyses of the games industry.

About us

At Gamesight, we use data to help games find commercial success. If you are looking for help getting your game's performance or influencer running and want to talk about this article, identify the right influencers, or measure your advertising needs, please contact us at gamesight.io.

This report is a follow-up on our last article on The Rise of the VTuber:

The Rise of the VTuber

Unsuprisingly, VTubers experienced another massive surge in popularity during the Covid-19 lockdown. With many indoor activities like concerts and conventions cancelled, droves of people started to discover VTubers in their newfound free time.

Gamesight BlogGabriel O’Meara

First of All... What is a VTuber?

Short for “Virtual YouTuber”, the phrase has grown to encompass all creators portrayed by character avatars to capture real time movement. While the trend originated in Japan during the mid-2010s, this novel technology has since become an international phenomenon. The success of VTubers can be seen as a synergistic combination of Japanese idol culture, such as AKB48, and otaku anime fan culture.

VTubers, unlike real idols, often hide their real identity, enhancing audiences’ immersions of the character they perform as on stream, allowing for anonymity and privacy.

With this layer of separation, they’re able to fully invest in their distinct brand identities and personalities without being barred by stringent expectations often placed on celebrities in real life.

While Anime-style VTuber character rigs are the driving force of the industry, VTubers are not limited to any certain art style. Many streamers create avatar rigs of their own style, whether that’s 3D, cartoon, or a completely abstract character. Many creators even represent themselves with small pictures that move when they talk, calling themselves “PNGTubers” for days they don’t want to turn their cameras on. Many streamers also use PNG avatars to represent their friends on their streams, like LilyPichu.

What is the state of the VTuber market?

1. There are over 49,500 active VTubers live streaming on Twitch and YouTube Live Gaming! Breaking it down, there's 37.3K channels on Twitch and 12.2K on YouTube Live Gaming.
2. VTubers outpace traditional streamers in terms of growth on both Twitch and YouTube Live.
3. While VTubers represent a minority of 0.4% of active channels, they make up a higher percentage of viewer hours watched at 5.7%.
4. On average, VTubers have higher audience engagement than non-VTubers on Twitch – 48% to 52%.
5. VTuber fans are excited to help their favorite streamers grow and generate a huge amount of fan content.

Gamesight

The marketing platform for video game publishers to build community, engage influencers, and measure their digital marketing performance.

What are the Different Types of VTubers?

VTubers can be broadly classified into corporate and independent. While both types share the essential commonality of using a virtual character rig to represent themselves online, there are significant differences in levels of management including: terms of recruitment, company backing, character licensing, content ownership rights, networking opportunities, revenue splits, and audience reach.

Corporate Vtubers

For corporate VTubers, companies own the rights to their talent’s names, lore, images, likenesses, and content made. To get cast by companies like hololive and NIJISANJI, aspiring VTubers go through a competitive audition process to get contracted and debut. Companies invest significant resources into their VTubers, with long term marketing strategies and objectives.

There has also been a rise of brand-affiliated VTubers promoting products and engaging with the consumer base, such as Netflix’s N-Ko, Crunchyroll’s Hime, Tony the Tiger, and SEGA’s very own Sonic and Tails.

Independent (Indie) VTubers

Independent VTubers manage their own content, create and commission their own character rigs, and grow their own community without corporate affiliation. However, this does not make them any less professional. Many indie VTubers get contracted by talent agencies like Mythic Talent and VShojo. Unlike traditional VTuber corporations, these agencies do not own the legal rights to their content, instead helping their talent find deals and help with legal matters when applicable.

When did VTubers Start Getting Popular?

Ami Yamato is widely credited for being the first creator to utilize a virtual avatar in 2011. In 2016, Kizuna Ai donned the title of "Virtual YouTuber," becoming the first modern age VTuber. VTuber agency Hololive took the internet by storm, proven by the instant success of Gawr Gura's debut in 2021 when she became the number one most subscribed VTuber within a year. Creator IronMouse continues to break records during her Twitch sub-a-thons, beating the record again in 2023 with 172K subs. As of 2023, Gamesight has documented over 49.5K VTubers that stream actively on Twitch and YouTube Live Gaming.

How are VTubers Doing on YouTube Live vs Twitch?

VTubers on YouTube Live Gaming

In 2023 up to June, VTubers consisted of 1.4% of the active YouTube Live Gaming community, and 9.6% of all viewer hours. VTubers grew in viewership by 28%, while non-VTubers decrease by 6%. There are 21.6K active YouTube Live Gaming VTuber channels, and 2.5K active VTuber fan channels that upload clips.

VTubers on Twitch

On Twitch, they consisted of 0.3% of the community and represented 5% of all Twitch viewer hours. VTubers also enjoyed 52% of engagement compared to 48% of non-VTubers. Audience engagement is defined as when a viewer watches the stream for more than 20 minutes. VTuber viewership grew 515% from October 2017 to 2023, compared to non-VTubers' 200% growth rate.

What are VTubers Top Streamed Categories?

On YouTube Live Gaming, VTubers enjoyed adventure, RPG, and sandbox games, with the top 3 being Minecraft, Apex Legends, and Pokemon.

On Twitch, VTubers enjoyed the non-gaming category, adventure, and RPG games, with the top 3 being Just Chatting, VRChat, and ASMR.

We're excited to provide the numbers on how far VTubers have come since our last check-in, and we'll continue to look forward to how VTubers dominate the world of digital entertainment.

To dive more into the exclusive statistics behind Twitch and YouTube Live, check out our free 2023 report on the state of VTubers.

Gamesight

The marketing platform for video game publishers to build community, engage influencers, and measure their digital marketing performance.

On Twitch, YouTube Live, and other live streaming platforms, the multitude of community chat messages takes the stage as much as the creators themselves. This rich, first-order community feedback provides organic data on audience sentiment. However, it's difficult to extract valuable and actionable signals hidden within the endless stream of emotes.

While many off-the-shelf sentiment analysis products for social media sites like Twitter and Instagram exist, Twitch and similar gaming chats cannot be analyzed with the same conventional methods. Twitch chat acts as a unified collective, characterized by individuals echoing and amplifying popular sentiments through repeated messaging. This phenomenon gives rise to a vast ocean of noise, further clouded by emotes, jokes, "copypastas," and sarcasm, requiring a nuanced understanding of Twitch culture and ever-evolving gaming trends.

Instead of scrolling through millions of messages by hand, Gamesight uses sentiment analysis backed by natural language processing, industry knowledge, and firsthand experience about how gamers chat to offer the best-in-class Twitch and YouTube sentiment analysis product. This allows you to get direct insights on community feedback provided on a stream, decoding those cryptic emojis and memes into actual sentiment.

How Can We Use Chat Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis offers invaluable insights to both game developers and marketing teams. Instead of quantifying player response based on ambiguous feedback and a few vocal users, you can receive a detailed data-driven overview of live reactions.

Here are some examples of how sentiment analysis can help your campaign and development cycles:

1. Understanding player preferences: Sentiment analysis can be used to understand player preferences for different aspects of a game, such as the gameplay, graphics, and story. Understanding what your fans like about your game can then be used to reaffirm or adjust community analysis, improve the game, and make it more appealing to players.
2. Targeting marketing campaigns: Once developers can take the guesswork out of understanding their player base, this information can then be used to more strategically target and segment the market, increasing return on investment.
3. Adjusting marketing strategies: If there’s a new game trailer, or any form of announcement - sentiment analysis can be used to tangibly identify which aspects of the game generated the most user interest and hype.
4. Identifying bugs and glitches: Identify negative sentiment about a game, which can be a sign of bugs, glitches, or player pain points. This information can then be used to quickly find common issues and improve the player experience.
   

Although our product is centered around analyzing gaming sentiment, sentiment analysis can be used for non-gaming applications. Because we tailored our solution for the Twitch and Youtube communities, nearly all of the above use cases can be translated for movies, shows, and other non-endemic products.

Big Challenges in Twitch Chat

To understand how Gamesight's sentiment model works, we first need to identify the major challenges that Twitch chat presents. Some of the most prominent problems with building a Twitch chat sentiment model include constantly evolving emote usage with new emotes emerging regularly, using emotes to modify the meaning of messages, dealing with sarcasm, and handling very short chats.

To tackle these challenges, we have developed a novel solution that combines several approaches to pull true sentiment from the noise of chat.

The Emote Meta

Let's focus on emotes in particular. Chatters employ emotes to accentuate a message's sentiment and to convey a sentiment on their own when posted independently. This aspect is not unique to Twitch, but custom emotes are. Streamers can create new emotes exclusive to their channel, introducing unknowns that sentiment models cannot recognize. This poses a recurring challenge as new emotes emerge regularly, and certain streamers have a chat that utilizes an entirely different set of emotes, making identification through conventional means nearly impossible. So, this raises the question - how can we attribute sentiment values to these new emotes with unknown sentiment values?

Word Vectorization

Gamesight uses word vectorization to classify new emotes with unknown sentiment values on Twitch. It projects emotes into physical space, treating each emote as a coordinate in a multi-dimensional graph. From there, we observe how unknown and known emotes are used in Twitch chat in conjunction with text. By plotting the known and unknown emotes in this physical space, we can observe that emotes closer in this space have a more similar sentiment.

Calculating which emotes are close within this physical space allows us to extrapolate emote sentiment based on previous chat data, enabling a sentiment model that evolves with Twitch.

B-b-bonus fact!

Because these emotes and words occupy a physical space, we can do intuitive vector addition.

For example: “FeelsGoodMan” - “:)” = “FeelsBadMan”

Data Cleaning

Gamesight's Chat Sentiment Analysis also performs data cleaning, ensuring the removal of noise such as Twitch Prime subscriptions, announcements, moderator messages, and streamer messages from the dataset.

The Importance of N-Grams

Another powerful tool in chat sentiment analysis is the examination of n-grams, which are one to n (where n is any number) phrases commonly repeated in chats. By analyzing these n-grams and their triggers, we gain valuable insights into moments that stand out - whether they involve hype, surprising twists, widely agreed-upon ideas, or even pain points.

Message Classification and Sarcasm

With Gamesight's Chat Sentiment Model, we classify messages as either Positive, Negative, Neutral, or Mixed, with the use of positive and negative text heavily influenced by the emotes employed.

Positive Example: “honestly how funny would it be if we fight banana gators here”

Negative Example: “NOPERS dont play this game”

NOPERS is an emote of the Pepe frog disapprovingly shaking its head.‌ ‌

Neutral Example: “That's the technical term OhISay”

OhISay is an emote of an anime character with a monocle and a mustache.

Mixed Example: “I think I'd like this game better if they removed the gameplay”

This Twitch chat example is a sarcastic joke, since it’s impossible to remove “gameplay.”

Mixed is an example of how we handle sarcasm, as we consider sarcasm to be an incongruence in sentiment (i.e., a message that the algorithm would consider positive, but in reality, it is actually negative - and vice versa).

Putting It All Together

Overall, Gamesight's Chat Sentiment Analysis provides an industry leaning tool for understanding and leveraging the sentiments expressed in Twitch chat for various applications. Quickly understand and react to millions of messages spanning thousands of streams to keep in-touch and understand your community.

If you would like to see Gamesight’s sentiment model in action, check out our 2022 Summer Games Fest Blog Post!

About us

At Gamesight, we use data to help games find commercial success. If you are looking for help getting your game's performance or influencer running and want to talk about this article, identifying the right influencers, or measuring your advertising needs, please reach out to us at gamesight.io.

Gamesight Podcast | Spotify | Apple | Google | YouTube

It's the Gamesight podcast.

Yane An: Welcome to the Gamesight podcast. We have here with us Kelly Wallick, and she is a founder, community builder, investor. And self-titled perpetual optimist. Love that. So you've been in the games industry for over 10 years, and you are an indie games guru. You support indie creators and you've given them a platform in a very ruthless industry. According to your profile, you've showcased over 900 unique titles at 33 global events, and you went from being a project manager to a chairperson for the Independent Games Festival to founding the Indie Mega Booth, which is finally back after three long years of hibernation.

Yes, I love that. So welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Kelly Wallick: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, doing really well. Getting ready to take a little bit of time off next week and doing a staycation, so looking forward to that. And been busy and working a lot of exciting things lately. So, yeah, feeling good.

Yane An: Yeah, so I mean, the biggest thing is definitely Mega Booth is coming back.

For people who don't know, what Mega Booth is do you wanna give a little bit of a rundown?

Kelly Wallick: Yeah. So there's not like a super great elevator pitch because it's kind of a lot of things to a lot of people. But, I think of it as like a showcase for independent game developers.

It had been running for about 10 years. We worked with, I think yeah, eight, 800 studios to showcase like over 900 titles globally. I think did like 30 some events across the world. During the time that it was running and really like what started off as just kind of a way for indie developers to get recognition at, at a show like pax, which is like a consumer facing event in the game space really became like a community and a network of developers.

They're all working together to help to support each other. And then with us kind of behind the scenes acting as an infrastructure, as an, and a way to advocate to like publishers and platform holders and to run grant and scholarship programs. We really started to focus a lot on promoting like diversity in the game space and getting more and different kinds of voices involved.

And so I think the Mega Booth over time kind of became like the stepping stone for people into the games industry and into the ccindie scene. And then, for fans or for publishers or for platform holders, a way to kind of like discover like who are the new up and coming teams, what's kind of the latest and greatest thing?

Yane An: Can you tell us about how that process has been and how you're feeling, and are there any like big changes coming up?

Kelly Wallick: Yeah, so a bunch of big changes with that. So the Mega Booth is probably what I'm, most well known for in the industry. I founded it and ran that for about like 10 years before it went into hibernation, during the pandemic, which, the events industry basically just like collapsed within like a few weeks of itself, right?

It was really like painful, complicated experience for me. And, something that I loved and cared about and a lot of people in the community loved and cared about. And so, during all this time it's like I was taking some time off and really like thinking about what did I wanna do next?

Was there ever gonna be a place for the Mega Booth in the future? what was that gonna be like? And it just, the pandemic just kept going, right? Yeah. And it wasn't, wasn't clear to me what was gonna happen. And so I was thinking a lot about yeah, what's next for me?

And how do I still continue to have impact in the game space in a way that I really care about?

And so one of the opportunities that was coming up was that the 1Up fund was finishing up our investing in fund one and we're moving into getting started on fund two.

And so I had an opportunity to join as a partner in the fund which is really exciting. Puts me in a decision making position. Ed and I are the two partners in the fund basically, so I'm like half of the decision making power of the fund, which is a, a really cool situation to be in. I love working with them.

I love the work that we're doing. So I joined about a year and a half ago on that. And so that's been like where my primary focus has been.

But in the meantime, people are still, as like things are starting to happen again, they're oh, we missed the Mega Booth, and is it ever gonna come back?

And what's gonna happen? So, Yeah. And so, I kind of kept everything on a back burner, like the website was still there and like I was still paying for like the hosting and just kind of keeping stuff there, like just in case there was an opportunity to bring it back. Yeah. So I started reaching out to some folks and just getting together like a team that's a combination of some folks who were worked out in the past and some new people and just, took some of the money that I was able to save back up and put it back into getting some people on board to just like blow off all the dust and get it going.

And so, there's some things that are the same. we're trying to kind of get back up to like where we were and doing the showcases and running the grant and scholarship programs and doing all the stuff that everybody kind of like knows and loves with the mega booth. But then really thinking about what is this next iteration of that look like?

Yane An: Mm-hmm.

And for me, like to have this role where I'm a bit more of like in a kind of like advisory or like a board member sort of just guiding it and letting like a group of this new team and people who love and care about it to like really take it and run with it.

At some point, it's like I wanna make space for like new people and new ideas and what is the next generation of like leaders and gamers and game developers and stuff look like in the industry. And how do I foster and support that without not that I was like blocking it from happening, but without holding onto something for so long.

Just because it's precious to me in a way.

Yane An: Mm-hmm.

Kelly Wallick: It's an interesting situation, because there's a lot of me stepping back and being okay, it's gonna be okay. I trust what's gonna happen with it. And I love the work that I'm doing with the 1Up Fund, but those, like the Mega Booth, has like a special place in my heart.

And so it's kinda I feel like I, I don't have kids, but I feel like a little, like my kids are going off to college or something. Please take all the lessons that I taught you, and go and be free. But then also please call me and tell me what you're doing.

Yane An: Very wholesome. I think in terms of indie games, we've definitely seen the industry become something sort of in the shadows to the mainstay of gaming now. Can you tell me a little bit about how you've sort of seen the evolution of indie games as a genre in the games industry over time?

Kelly Wallick: Yeah, it's interesting, like Minecraft started off as an indie game, right? And like Stardew Valley, which is like wildly popular, started off as indie. But yeah, so there's like these kind of like breakout hits, right?

Or things that, that come from the indie game space that start as like a very small team and, and become something really big. and I, I think that early, early on for me, indie games have been going on like much longer than I've been in the games industry. But like for me, my experience of it is that it was a small-ish group.

There was like a lot of walled gardens, like before, like platforms like steam and stuff opened up with green light that everybody could submit to it.

Yane An: Mm-hmm.

Kelly Wallick: There was a transition between like physical and digital distribution and there was a transition on making your own engine and having to be super technical to like being able to use things like Unity and Unreal and, and Entwined and like GameMaker and stuff that just like made the process of making games more accessible to more and different kinds of people. Mm-hmm. And so it was kind of for me it was like seeing the transition. Like there's this, like people playing around in this transitionary space early on and a lot of just like people kind of figuring out what is this new landscape looking like?

And there's kind of like a, what felt like an indie gold rush era for a little bit, where like a bunch of indie games started to get popular and make money, and then everybody wanted to make an indie game. And then it was oh my god, there's hundreds and thousands of indie games. And so then what does the discoverability--

Yane An: Mm-hmm.

Kelly Wallick: Issue look like? And then also all these conversations starting up too around how do you take this thing that's like kind of artistic and creative and be able to pay people to work on it and make money. And like this idea, this I think kind of romanticized around oh, I have $40,000 and we all eat ramen and we live in a basement, and like we make a game.

That's great and that's a cool story, but also like it excludes a giant amount of people to be able to like be in the process of making games. Right. So I think that there is like a kind of, I wanna say like a leveling up in like maybe the business acumen or kind of an understanding and, and maturing. I think a little bit of the thought process around it. Cause there used to be also this feeling of if you took money from a publisher or you took money from this, you were a sellout. But the only people who don't need to take money, like have money.

Right? Yes. Or they're, or they're getting exploited supported by someone. Yeah, yeah. Or they're getting exploited or something. Right. Then it kind of shifted a bit more to do you have creative ownership and do you still own the IP?

And there's still like every year in the IGF there's always conversations about is this an indie game? Or what is the line of that? And I think those kinds of conversations are super important, right? Because it's like there's always this evolution of what stories are we trying to tell?

What technologies are we using? Like what are we trying to express? Who are we? Supporting who and what does that, what does that all look like? And there's just, I think like the indie space in general is just always on the, the edges of those conversations. And so it's just this like constantly evolving thing.

But I think like the two biggest things that I feel really happy to see during the time that I had been working in the space, was that the diversity level of the people making the games and having access to resources grew like crazy. When I was first working on this stuff, there were so few women that were even at studios, let alone running studios, let alone talk about any other kind of marginalized community.

Yane An: Mm-hmm.

Kelly Wallick: And by the time I was leaving, it was just, I just felt like there was so much diversity and so many cool things. The younger generations of people coming up with their values and their ideas and stuff, and seeing that grow and blossom.

And then also, just the reality of yeah this is creative, but also if you wanna support new and different kinds of creators coming in and support the industry in general, people need to get paid for their work.

We need to have fair deals. It's okay to wanna sell it. It's also okay to not wanna sell it, depending on your situation, but let's bring all those people into the conversation. And not kind of make it feel that if someone needs to get paid for their work or needs to be compensated or needs to get a publishing deal, or needs to get an investment or something that, they can't be part of the club.

Those two big changes aside from the content of the game, games and how that is sort of shifted over time is kind of the behind-the-scenes thing that had, were the two biggest like shifts that I think I saw.

Yane An: I love that. That was a very high level overview and I can just imagine how many, hundreds of stories there are within each point of the timeline that you shared.

Right? Yeah, yeah. Very intense. It's a huge community and everybody's sort of like building it up together, so that's amazing to see. Yeah.

Kelly Wallick: Yeah, it's, it is very cool. There's so many stories and so many teams and so much stuff that I got to be kind of witness to over, over the time of working on that and, and to still be witness to it, in the case of working with VC backed teams and startups and studios in that space as well too. It's a unique situation to be in, to be able to kind of step back a bit and look at the forest for the trees.

Yane An: Exactly. Yeah. And then along those lines in your VC experience how exactly does the funding process work and how do you get the infrastructure and the funding for these teams?

Kelly Wallick: There's more avenues of funding and resources available than ever before, which I think is really exciting and really cool. When I was first starting off in the industry, I remember asking someone where do people get money for games?

For real.

Yeah. I know. It was so funny because I was where are you getting the money from it? And the answers were, it was pretty limited? It was sort of like you got a publisher deal or you had your own money, and some equity investing in the game space.

But I'd say it was pretty rare. And it was mostly for larger companies. And the idea that a VC would invest in an indie game was literally laughable. What about investors? And people were like ahaha, that would never happen. and here we are few years later and it's like totally happening.

And then like there was the addition of crowdfunding. So then you have all the Kickstarter stuff that was starting. So like when I, earlier was talking a bit about these changes around being able to digitally distribute your game and to have the walled gardens come down and get access to these tools.

There was also more access to funding avenues that weren't available before. So something Kickstarter or crowdfunding. And so I think there's a lot of different opportunities. There's a lot of platforms and companies as well too that have started like grant programs and other programs to help with prototyping or early development or indie scale projects.

There's a lot more stuff that's focused on increasing diversity in the game space, so funds that are specifically created for that which is really cool. But there's always still people struggling to find the money that they need outside of the US. There's also a lot of government grants and programs that will support the games industry.

So Canada has the Canadian Media Fund, which is really robust. A lot of Europe has funds that are a couple hundred thousand dollars, especially early for prototype funding for teams to start. The US sadly doesn't have anything like that. It's pretty common outside the US.

We have other avenues of funding available, there's more investment in VC for example, that happens in the US. But I think that there's more kind of avenues than there were in the past, but it's still is depending on your situation and your networks and your understanding of these things. It can still be challenging to like get matched up with the funding and the types of funding that that you might need.

And so I don't have kind of a good like answer of oh, here's where all the money is. But just more that I think to be flexible about your thinking about like how this might work or what that might look like and that there actually is a lot of interest in the game space and people putting more money and more resources into it.

And I think being a bit more varied about the types of projects and ideas and things that, that are willing to be supported.

Yane An: You heard it here first, or maybe not first, but it's a great time to make an indie game right now. Yeah, yeah.

Kelly Wallick: It's always a great time.

Yane An: Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

Can you tell me more about you mentioned it a little bit, but your work with one up and being co-chair on that team?

Kelly Wallick: Yeah. So I'll give a little kind of context on the 1Up Fund. So that was founded by a guy named Ed Fries who he was at Microsoft starting off I think in the early eighties and on like Excel and Word and --

Yane An: Oh, wow. Wow.

Kelly Wallick: Kind of the things that you think about when you think of Microsoft. Right. And then at some point they had wanted to make a games department and he was really interested in games and had been making games for a while. So he took over the games department and then helped to build and grow it up through the launch of the original Xbox and then stayed on for a long time to work on their publishing.

And so after he retired from Microsoft, did some other work and stuff, and then was putting together the concept of this venture fund. And so his idea around it was that he really wanted to have a strong community component to it.

Yane An: Mm-hmm.

Kelly Wallick: And so that meant taking up all of the founders and connecting them with each other to help to support each other through the process of like interesting building a studio and making a game and for me, coming from the indie space, that totally makes sense because you kind of have to do that in the indie space because you don't have all this infrastructure and resources and access to things that people at a big AAA company might have.

So it's super common, especially for people to make local communities and now online communities and to like be collaborative because it's too hard to be competitive. Like you just kind of can't, we're all gonna sink at the same time. Right. And so we got connected up around that part of it because of my work with the Mega Booth and all the stuff that I've been doing in the indie community.

And then when we talked, we had a lot of shared values around what we imagined for this community and then also shared values around diversity and shared values around making positive change in the games industry. And I had no idea anything about the VC part.

That sounds cool, but the part that I really liked was the kind of ethos of the community aspect of it. And then also venture funds basically fund themselves through management fees, which are generated from the overall amount of the fund. And so I had a budget that I could actually put into supporting the community stuff.

Where in the mega booth it was we're always bootstrapped and I had big ideas about things that I would've loved to do, but kind of never had the resources to do it. So I was okay, well this is a cool way to work with someone that I like to do something that I think is cool, in a way that's gonna be funded and resourced.

Yeah, so I started working on that and then, yeah, over the years had just been learning more about how venture funding works. What does equity investment in the game space look like? It was something that I got really interested in especially kind of during the pandemic, seeing how much money and resources and investing in stuff was going into the game space.

It's very impactful to be able to just give people money. It's a really powerful resource and there are not a lot of people like me that are in decision making positions. Around something right, like funding and especially in investing.

So for me it felt like a really unique opportunity to keep making the impact that I wanted to make and keep working with and supporting teams the way that I wanted to.

I love the portfolio teams that we work with, we do 50 investments per fund, and we're partway through, we're just starting to invest out of our second fund. So we've done like 60 some investments at this point. And so I'm working with a large number of studios and teams and companies again.

And seeing them like from the ground up and following along on their journey is really cool. It's a neat opportunity. Yeah. Yeah.

Yane An: I mean, you're really changing people's lives.

I hope so. And I think one of the things that I loved with the Mega Booth, and I love with this, is that I'm really a big fan of like long term sustainable changes. That's really how change happens it's just like this consistent kind of slow moving, intentional, walking towards like a goal or an ideal and you can affect all of these different people and all these different things and all these different projects in ways that like you don't understand until much later.

Like when I had to put the Mega Booth into hibernation, I was getting so many kind emails and just really lovely notes from people about how it had changed the trajectory of their career and their lives and the people that they met. And some of 'em I hadn't heard from in years, but it had been 10 years that we had been doing this and so had all these ripple effects that I didn't know anything about at the time.

And so I think that continuing that kind of work and continuing to do it in spaces in the indie space, like I said, I saw the change in the diversity and the styles of games and people and the programs and stuff.

Who is that gonna affect and what is that gonna mean? And even from the player side, the kinds of games and content and stuff that gets made can affect how people see each other and how they communicate with each other and what they think of the world. That's big.

Oh my gosh. Like tears. I'm a very emotional person, so I'm trying to be oh, professional podcast. Oh my gosh. Oh gosh.

Kelly Wallick: That's so sweet. Yeah.

Yane An: Very lovely. Amazing work. 10 outta 10, no notes. Yeah. Thank you. Oh gosh.

Kelly Wallick: Yeah. It's funny because I used to be in the sciences and maybe it can seem silly to put your time and energy into video games.

This thing that feels like not quite mainstream, or maybe people think it's silly or dismissive or something. But I think it's huge opportunity. And I think there's big culture and social shifts that can happen through like the media that's created and, and really, --

Yane An: Definitely.

Kelly Wallick: Games are the fastest growing form of entertainment now, and it's outpacing a lot of traditional media and this is kind of the future of how people interact with each other and yeah, learn from each other.

And to kind of have sort of stumbled into the industry a bit in a way, and get to kind of be involved in seeing that change and grow is I think it's super cool. It's a rare time.

Yane An: Yeah. I definitely agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Cultural impact of games is real.

Kelly Wallick: Yeah, exactly.

Yane An: I guess we can go into some hard questions.

Kelly Wallick: Sure. Yeah.

Yane An: Obviously you have a big heart and you wanna help all these creators, but --

Kelly Wallick: I do. Yeah.

Yane An: As a leader in this space, you also have to make hard calls in terms of fielding games and deciding what gets funded and not, so what are you looking for in terms of projects you do wanna invest in and what happens when you can't support everybody? You have to be strategic with the funds. Right.

Yeah, I mean that's hard for me. Like you said, I kind of have a big heart and I wanna help everybody which I generally actually try as much as that's possible.

And it's interesting because so the way that we did curation for the Mega Booth and the way that we look at games for the 1Up fund and the way that, a publisher might look at a game they're all sort of slightly different lenses, right. And so one of the things that's really smart about the way that Ed had set up the 1Up fund is that and for folks who may not be super familiar with how equity investing works, you generally when you do like a priced round you have a lead in investor who professionally sets the price of the round, like the valuation of the company, and then you have follow on investors on top of that.

And so the lead investor will do a bunch of due diligence. They'll look into all the financials and all the kind of deep dive and nitty gritty. Is this a good investment?

Mm-hmm.

Kelly Wallick: And, and then once they say yes, then you kind of have this opportunity where people can like follow onto the round afterwards.

So we act as a follow on investor. So it's like in some ways we don't have to say yes and no too often in the sense that that kind of gets filtered out first by a lead investor agreeing to be a part of it. So a lot of times, like we'll have conversations with folks and try to help them out and point them in the right direction.

If we really love their project to help them to try to find the lead investor or to yeah, just be okay, make sure you're talking to these people and this person. Get feedback on the deck, just try to kind of like get them on the right foot on their investing journey.

We make 50 investments for a fund, which is pretty, which is a lot of investing. Like most bigger firms might make five or six investments per year or something, or because they're the way that they're set up is a bit different. For us, like we only invest in games content, so it's only video game studios making video games. So anything that's kind of platforms or tech we get to say no to that right away.

Yane An: Mm-hmm.

Kelly Wallick: But then from there it's really about like what do we think of the team? What do we think of the project?

Ed and I, between the two of us have looked at thousands of game pitches and seeing lots of projects come and go. And so I think you kind of get a second sense for I think it's less around like what game is gonna do well and what team? It's more about I think what teams and what people are gonna navigate the process of making a game the best and for the best chance of success in that way.

And so, it's kind of a bit of a like fuzzy math for us, on what resonates and kind of some intuition and some experience around this. And then sometimes it's just taking a chance on a team and an idea that just seems maybe they'll make it and that'll be really, that'll be really cool and really interesting. But even for folks who we end up saying no to or that it doesn't work out for them, we try to be helpful point them to other avenues of funding that might be useful for them or give them feedback or just stay involved in their journey, if they decide to do something different in the future.

And for Mega Booth, we try to kind of do something similar as well too. Like we would encourage people to apply over multiple multiple years and be like hey, it wasn't a fit this time, but that doesn't mean that you're not gonna grow and change and make something new or different, or the circumstances are gonna change.

Once we've said yes to an investment, we have a lot of programs and workshops and meetups and things like that, that we really try to help the teams through this network and the community, which has a lot of programs that are around it, that are kind of intentional to create.

But even prior to that, a couple months ago, this past year we gave a talk at GDC that we really just broke down, like equity investing 101 in the games industry, what is equity investing versus project financing and what are the terms that you might run into and what should you keep your eye out for? We just kind of wanna be helpful to people to try to help them be and informed to make the best decisions that they can make for themselves.

Amazing. So you've been a huge part of this industry. You've done a lot of things in terms of changing the culture, highlighting so many different games, and helping people get connected and get funding.

Thank you so much for everything you've done and you're still continuing to support the future generations and just the indie games industry, and I hope you do feel the positive impact you've made in a lot of people's lives.

Gamesight Podcast | Spotify | Apple | Google | YouTube

Yane An: Welcome to the podcast. We have here with us, Justin Sacks, CEO of Nexus. How are you doing today?

Justin Sacks: I am great. I am excited to be here, so thanks for having me.

Yane An: Yeah, thanks for joining us. Here we got a, we got a fun little quote you once said: yesterday's astronauts are tomorrow's YouTubers.

Justin Sacks: That was more contrarian, you know, five years ago, and it's probably more obvious now, but it's basically just like if you were gonna pull any room of elementary, middle school or even high school kids, and you said, what do you wanna be when you grow up? The most common answer is going to be a YouTuber, or now it might be a streamer, but like 30 years ago it would've been an astronaut or the president or something like that.

And then really, like, that's a jumping off point. Well, what does that mean for society? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? How should we be building stuff and so really mostly the reason I like to think about that and bring that up is I think there was conversation a few years ago around the intersection between gaming and pop culture or specifically like gaming influencers and pop culture.

But I think that shouldn't even be the question now, cause really like gaming influencers are pop culture; they are the celebrities of today. And so it is intuitive to me that that's what, that's who people aspire to be like and what they wanna grow up to be. I also think it's a good thing, and that, that can take us in a tangent of like, you know, this is super long term, but I think the most common occupation in the future will be creators.

People that build an audience around themselves, either cause of aptitude or attitude.

Yane An: Yeah. So that's definitely true. I definitely think if you talk to a bunch of kids, they'll wanna be influencers, right?

That goes into like, ethics of media or like, the responsibility of like influencers and how they influence children, but we don't need, we don't need to go to all that.

Justin Sacks: Sure. Sure.

Yane An: Yeah. So, yeah. Tell me more about your experience with the creator economy.

And actually maybe we can even start with how did you come up with the idea for Nexus? You probably saw like a need, right? And then you started developing this idea.

Justin Sacks: Sort of, yeah, I think, I've really only ever done one thing my entire life. And it's kind of just the same thing over and over and figuring out how to make my own challenges and problems and like solve the right things for them. So my background is helpful into like how we came to this specific product.

So my whole professional career, I've been in the games industry. I got started as a pro gamer 16 years ago before eSports was even a word. And then I was a content creator myself, but back in those days, that went like literally writing blogs, which isn't even a word people use anymore, making videos back when there were MCNs and then I did streaming, but I streamed before Twitch was a thing on a platform

Yane An: called, Justin.TV or OWN3D?

Justin Sacks: Before Justin.Tv, it was called xFi and it was

Yane An: xFi.

Justin Sacks: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a while ago. It's interesting though to see some of the creators back then are still around today. So like the number one streamer xFi was Sodapoppin and he's still doing his thing

Yane An: He's doing great. Yeah.

Justin Sacks: –today. So that was my world. And then I built a little coaching website for League of Legends when I was at school.

And then I ended up joining a media company in the games industry. After that, they were called Curse and they owned and operated a bunch of different websites and communities and tools. All for the industry, really focused on PC games. I joined them when they were pretty small. Curse ended up growing to a few hundred folks and they were acquired by Twitch and Amazon in 2016.

I ran biz dev for the media side and then during that acquisition is when I left to start Nexus and really like the thesis, which has remained true. history of our company, even though the product has changed, it's just that discovery has fundamentally shifted in the industry, how players learn about games, get excited about games, decide to buy them or play them, or engage with them and then stick with them.

That has changed, and I can get in the whole spiel of what it's been throughout history, but really today driven by the personalities that people follow. So your favorite streamers or YouTubers or the Discord servers you're a part of. But there's a real big challenge around attribution for publishers.

Like how do they know who drove value for them? How do they work with all those individual personalities, influencers, creators? And then if you are a creator, there's a real big problem around credit and monetization, like how do you get what you deserve for driving all that value? And so Nexus is really the infrastructure that sits between the influencer and the game publisher. We try our best to align the incentives between both.

So we like to say that we're a creator program in a box. I'll explain like what that is, but super high level. If you're familiar with Fortnite's wonderful, Support-A-Creator program. We build that for all the games that aren't Fortnite. And so we help awesome live service game publishers, handle onboarding for our creator programs, handle dashboarding, and then Nexus also supports with payouts and taxes and all that sort of stuff.

And so we've built a bunch of product along the way. But the vision for Nexus and what we do today, a lot of it is seeing what are the different pieces that have worked the best for creators so far that publishers found value in.

And then how can we enhance those and make them more readily available for both sides? And so, like I said, we saw Epic do such a great job with their Support-a-Creator that really drove the zeitgeist to Fortnite. And we're like, okay, every game should be able to have this. Can we help support that?

Yane An: That's true. Yeah. Fortnite definitely like completely blew up people's careers, right? Overnight or not overnight. Over multiple seasons. Yeah, but that makes a lot of sense with your background too. I actually grew up playing a lot of League of Legends, so big fan of Curse.

You're like, oh, from like a humble small company called Curse.

You might know it. And it's like, yes, we know Curse. Yeah.

Justin Sacks: Curse is interesting cause you can find old alumni at so many different companies. Curse ended up being bought by Twitch and then being sold to Fandom and then a part of it sold to Overwolf.

And so like people got spread out everywhere. So there's folks, old Curse team members, kind of everywhere you look, even though we were never that big of a company.

Yane An: It's kind of beautiful because you guys started out as like the original blueprint creators, right? Like you said, like before eSports was even a word, and now you guys are creating this infrastructure for creators in the future. It's beautiful. Yeah.

So obviously we know now that the creator economy is like the standard, right? In 2023. If you wanna grow your games, you have to pay attention to your community, support your community, especially since most games now are like games as a service, right? It's like an ongoing developing product.

Do you wanna tell everybody a little bit about our integration together, like how Gamesight and Nexus work together?

Justin Sacks: Sure. Yeah. So I met Adam, the CEO of Gamesight, god, maybe half a decade ago.

Yane An: Oh my.

Justin Sacks: Which makes both of us sound old, which he is. And we've been good friends ever since. He solves a really, really, really important need in the industry through you guys with Gamesight, which is like the attribution layer, and then also helping out on the marketing side of things.

And then Nexus, we do a totally different part, but is really synergistic with what you guys are all about, which I mentioned, which is some of the dashboarding and some of the monetization and the commerce that influencers can drive.

One of the things that we do together is we partner for a game publisher called Capcom, and then we have a couple other partners that are either in the works or about to be announced.

I guess like to dive into some of the specifics of what that partnership is, I think Capcom is a good example, which is you guys support them on all the things of prospecting who are the influencers and content creators that are a good fit, managing the relationship with them, helping out with the marketing, attribution, tech, all that sort of stuff.

And then really what Nexus does is we provide the commerce layer. So with Capcom specifically, any creator in the Capcom Creator program can, through Nexus, build their own store where they can feature Capcom products like the latest Street fighter title or Monster Hunter or Resident Evil or whatever it might be.

And then that creator's audience can go to their store, buy those games, those DLCs, whatever it is, and then support the creator at the same time. The whole point of Nexus is to align the incentives between the creator and the publisher so that whenever the creator is benefiting so is the publisher and when the publisher's benefiting, so is the creator.

So like that'swhat Nexus is all about. And then Gamesight really accelerates all that because you guys help make sure the right creators are a good fit, that they're aware of the program, they're participating in it, they're excited about it, they have the right messaging, all that sort of stuff.

Yane An: Yeah, I love that. And we actually just hit a year anniversary for Capcom Creators a while ago. So that's pretty exciting.

Justin Sacks: It's a good example too, because it's going really well. I think creators are a power law business, just like how gaming broadly is, meaning, you know, a small percentage of creators are a large percentage of the total audience in watch hours. But one of the things I think that's been really successful with the Capcom Creator program is justthe diversity of creators that have found success within it, that have either grown within the program, been discovered through the program or through some of the perks.I'm pretty proud of the partnership there.

Yane An: Yeah. Amazing stuff. I love it because it builds a community, but it also like standardizes the professional process. Right. Which is cool. Influencers are small business owners, so that's great.

I also saw you guys worked with like Town of Salem and Bloons TD, and now you guys are also in VR right? With Big Ballers.

Justin Sacks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's our first VR title.

Yane An: Exciting stuff.

Justin Sacks: Yeah, it's been a discovery internally within our company as well as like who are the publishers that we can be immediately most valuable to. And those are definitely live service games. And they're really live service games that already have both a player community, but also a creator community that adding this creator program, this revenue share perk just immediately drives real value for them.

And so, those are some of our wonderful, wonderful partners. So like Bloons Tower Defense, it's been around for a long time. It's made by an incredible studio called Ninja Kiwi based outc of New Zealand. It's been a little more than six months.

And it's been both from my perspective and from the publisher's perspective, like enormously successful, and the creators too. For the creators that love that game Bloons is one of their main titles. Now they have a way to make money when their audience stays engaged with the game, buys new stuff in the game.

Like, that's pretty awesome. We just did an activation this week where you can get an exclusive avatar in the game when you support your favorite creator.

And–

Yane An: I saw that! That was you guys?

Justin Sacks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm proud of that, I love that. It'sa win-win-win because it's awesome for the player.

They get something special. It's great for the creator because they have a really easy message to their audience and now they get, you know, additional income. And it's great for the publisher too because we've seen the more players supporting creators in your game the significantly, like significantly more positive impact you have on player behavior, on downstream player behavior. Like when a player starts supporting a creator, they stay more engaged with the game. They play the game more, they buy more stuff, they churn less. All of the metrics you want to go up. And so running those sort of activations is really great.

Town of Salem is neat becausethey're an indie team, they're a small team. Some of cthem are actually based in Austin where I'm from which is fun. And so like they couldn't build the infrastructure of having their own creator program would be prohibitively expensive. Like, how are you gonna handle financial payouts to dozens or hundreds of creators every month?

How are you gonna handle taxes at the end of the year? You know, building out those dashboards and those infrastructure isreally tough for a small team. So being able to support them was really awesome. And the, the Big Ballers VR is really cool. It's our first VR title and their creator audience is mostly TikTok.

And so that was kinda like a different learning for us, because usually our big creator platforms have been Twitch and YouTube. And so figuring out, well, what is different for the TikTok world was kind of like a fun learning and like building out some of the different integrations and that sort of stuff.

Yane An: Yeah. Have you actually found it is really a really different process for TikTok Gaming and TikTok creators.

Justin Sacks: There's not too much different for Nexus's part of everything. But I will say the platforms generally do have really different capabilities and values and strengths and weaknesses. YouTube is the best platform for conversion of getting someone to take an action. And it's because it's like built into being a VOD platform where you can pause the video, you can go do the thing that they're talking about, and you can come back and you don't miss any content.

And the message the creator gives to their audience is the same; every single viewer will get the same message versus on Twitch, they're really powerful for awareness, but They're less strong at conversion because when you're watching a Twitch stream, in order for you to go take the action they're talking about, you'd have to go interrupt your own content.

You'd have to interrupt your own experience in order to do it. And the messaging is ephemeral, meaning let's say the streamer talks about a thing in the first 15 minutes of their stream, but you come in on the 30th minute, you might not see it, and maybe they talk about it again three hours later, but then you leave before that happens.

You don't even know that that message happened. And then TikTok, of course, like the short form video has its own like unique stuff to it. I think it's important just to like, recognize the differences. And neither of them is better or worse than the other. It's just they're different in different ways.

And that's part of what we're learning too, is when we work with a publisher, we want to be able to support them as much as possible and offer best practices and help them to have a successful creator program and so it's important for us to really get those nuances as well.

Yane An: For sure. Yeah, I know for TikTok the engagement tends to be really low, even if the exposure is really high, right? Like people are just swiping, but you definitely get more eyes on the product.

Justin Sacks: Attribution is tough with TikTok because once you see a product four times in TikTok, when you're scrolling for 10 minutes, you're like, okay, I'm gonna go check out that thing. But for any individual thing that you see, you're probably not gonna make a specific action.

Yane An: Yeah, definitely. When I scroll through TikTok after an hour, I'm like, I don't remember anything I saw.

Justin Sacks: An hour of TikTok? I don't know. That

Yane An: True.

Justin Sacks: That seems like a lot.

Yane An: Yeah. You know, I'm really disciplined with my TikTok use. Ha

Justin Sacks: Yeah. Research, huh? Okay.

Yane An: Yeah. Research. Exactly. Yeah.

I'm sure you have a ton of experience at this point, working with a bunch of different creators, so I wonder if you could tell me more about the best practices and recommendations.

Justin Sacks: So it depends on the game which kind of like the not helpful cop-out answer. You can basically try out the program in the first month, and then you'll see the impact that it has on player behavior is so significant. The recommendation we give is to share as much revenue as possible with a that basically they're driving pure incremental sales and users for the publisher.

They're bringing in folks that you wouldn't reach otherwise, they're driving purchases. That wouldn't have happened otherwise. That you want to really be sharing as much as you can with a creator because the benefit is like two plus two equals five. The more that you share with a creator, the better an outcome you're gonna get for your game.

And so high level, that's how we start recommending publishers to think about it. But a lot of the times they are concerned about cannibalization of, Hey, what if a player was gonna buy this thing anyways, but now we have share 15% with a content creator… we're just losing 15% of our money.

And so we have so much data to show that's not true. fact, not only are the creators driving you purchasers and players that wouldn't have came in any other fashion. But when a player buys something and supports their creator, they become a better player. Like that feedback loop is so important and it emboldens them into the community that they stick around longer, they play more games.

They're gonna buy more things. They're the sort of player that you want in your game. And so you essentially, you want as many players as possible interacting with your creator program. So that avatar that we did within Bloons, those are powerful for reasons that might be a little bit unexpected.

So doing something where like, when a player supports a creator, they get a discount or they get additional currency, or they get some exclusive SKU, doesn't drive sales only because it's an interesting offer on its own. Like, yes, having a discount gets people to buy something normally that'snormal economics.

But really, the value is that it, it gives a really, really easy message to the creator, because now instead of them saying to their audience: “Hey, use my creator code, it supports me,” they get to say: “Hey, here's this new piece in the game that actually will help you, and the only way you can get it is by using a creator code.”

And so it, it turns the message from like, Hey, I'm asking you for something into, Hey, I'm giving you something their audience. Creators are way more comfortable doing that, of course. so that's why we recommend doing any of those activations. And some of the powerful ones are ones that are really easy for the publisher, which is things like, If you have an asset in your game that you haven't found a good use for, make it a creator exclusive SKU where the only people that can buy it are can buy it when they're supporting creators or like they get some special title or they get something that's really easy to generate that provides so much value for, for your creator community as well as your player community that we recommend doing those sort of activations.

We also do a bunch of stuff to make the messaging really easy for a creator. We'll create, you know, like, assets that they can put in their Twitch panel or in their YouTube header or in a chat bot that they can use that sort of stuff.

Whatever we can do to make the messaging easier for the creator is generally valuable. And then I guess the last piece is the tighter the feedback loop is, the more successful the program will be., which means like the feedback loop both for the player and the creator. For the creator, it's when they drive someone in their audience to go buy something, they know immediately that that happened.

That's really valuable. The tighter the loop is of the creator doing an action and then getting a reward, the better the program will be. But also for the player's side, we've seen be really helpful is when a player is supporting a creator, they get an immediate thank you message that feels personalized from the creator.

That's awesome. If it actually is personalized from the creator, that's incredibly awesome. And then you can do like integrations with their alert technology. So when a player buys a battle pass and game and it supports the creator and it shows up on stream, and then the streamer can say, oh, thanks for buying the battle pass.

Like that's.

Yane An: Amazing. Yeah.

Justin Sacks: It's a great easy message for the creator. The player feels really great, and then other players are like: “Oh, I didn't know this thing exists. Now I can do it,” And at the end of the day, the publisher is getting so much value from doing that.

Yane An: Amazing. And then you said you guys have a ton of data to prove that this is, this feedback loop works. Right? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Justin Sacks: Sure. Yeah. So we've done a couple of case studies with our partners. I've anonymized them, so I can't tell you who the specific games are, but I'm happy to share the data. Two things are important. One, this, all of the data I'm about to share in the insights comes from the publisher. So it's not us slicing and dicing any of the data or choosing specific cohorts.

And then two, for all the data I'm about to reference. None of this had any activations going. So there was no exclusive avatar that you could get. There wasn't a discount. It was players buying stuff in game using a creator code.

At the same cost, at the same price, at the same time that have bought without using creator code. All right, so the first app in one of our games and probably the biggest number that we're most proud of, 40% of players that used a creator code to make a purchase had never bought anything in that game before.

either. The creator acquired that new player for the game, or that player was already playing, but they were just a pure free to play player. now they started buying stuff inside of the game because the creator made that call to action and that. So that's usually called conversion, which is like converting a free player into a paid player.

And the average conversion rate for a successful live service game is like 1.8%. It's like a really number. So we're really proud to be in order of magnitude higher than that, and that's across tens of thousands of transactions and,

Yane An: That's crazy. 40%. That's like almost half.

Justin Sacks: this next number is also great; 15% of players that use their creator code to buy something had churned out of the game. So they used to be playing the game. They used to be spending, they hadn't bought anything in 60 days and the first purchase back used the creator code, which means the creator got that person to come back into the game. And that's like a really valuable thing for these live service games is when someone turns out, how do you actually get them back?

And creators are one of the best ways to do that. Some of the other data, so like on retention data, we measured everything from D7 to D180. So like how long did a player actually stick around in that game? After starting and in every single cohort that we measured players were twice as likely or about twice as many players stuck around if they were interacting with a creator program versus otherwise.

And like the best one, a big question publishers have is around cannibalization. Even after you pay out a creator, the LTV of a player is twice as high as the average player if they're interacting with a creator program. So like even after all the costs and fees of doing a creator program, it's the most valuable.

It's the best ROAS you can have for for a game publisher.

Yane An: Wow. I mean, I'm sold.

Justin Sacks: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. There are games that it doesn't work great for. There's like reasons why it's not the perfect solution, but like for the things that we work well with, there is no better product.

Yane An: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean the games that you guys are partnering with already have like these passionate communities, right?

Justin Sacks: We're gonna do our best for newly launched games, but like Town of Salem too is a good example. And then the game we're partnering on that we haven't announced yet is another good example where it's a sequel, meaning. There's already a community of players that played the game.

There's already a community of creators that are knowledgeable and aware of it, and so putting a creator program in it, it's as if the game has been out for a while but like totally newly launched games, they should work with a Gamesight to acquire content creators. Nexus is not the best like creator acquisition platform, but we are absolutely the best creator retention platform.

Yane An: For sure. Amazing. Solid pitch. Yeah.

But I know Twitch is implementing a lot of changes. I'm sure you, you've been following everything in terms of like, like, oh, ads can only be like 3% of the screen, and you're not allowed to do like Instream video sponsor shout outs.

How are you guys like adjusting to that or has that affected your platform at all?

Justin Sacks: A lot of that is still in flux. You know, there is. A significant community response to the announcement. And so Twitch is kind of figuring out what is the right policy and plans moving forward. And so you know, we're not gonna change anything until a lot of that is more set. But we've built Nexus to be very intentionally platform agnostic, so we're happy to support creators wherever their audience are.

We partner with creators at the most organic and natural point, which is them literally commercializing the products that they love. The creators that find the most value with Nexus are the ones that are playing games that they're already excited about. So like when we launched with Bloons, it wasn't us going and getting a bunch of creators who've never played before to come play the game. We're simply like supercharging the creators that already love the game, that they've been playing it for seven years.

This is their favorite title. This is, you know, one of the two games that they play. It's like the only thing that their audience watches. And the program just makes it even a better experience for everyone involved. And so, we're not really advertising. We're really like partnering with the products that they already play and use and talk about.

So I'm not super worried about any of that stuff. And we'll see what happens when it happens.

Yane An: Yeah, I don't think it would affect your guys' product at all. In like a tangible sense, do you provide a storefront for creators, or is it, for example, on Twitch, like a button in their bio or something like that?

Justin Sacks: It depends. The ideal version is an in-game creator code, which means the creator, they come to Nexus, they get a code, and so it would be like their username or whatever it is, and they'd simply tell their audience like, hey when you're in-game, going to buy something, you can use my code. And then when you buy it, it supports me as the creator.

That's like the ideal loop with some games, like it's more challenging to do that technical integration. And so they leverage our web store technology. And so basically a creator comes to us and they build their own little game store, takes them two minutes to do. So they choose their favorite games or DLCs or whatever it might be, and they get to choose the branding, the aesthetic, all that sort of stuff for their store.

And then they tell their audience, Hey, go to this link. So next is Nexus.gg slash creator name, and then when someone goes there and buys something, they get a key. So often it's a steam key, and then that customer can go put that key into steam or wherever it is, redeem the content, and then the purchase happens through Nexus, so the creator still gets a piece of it.

So most of the time it happens in game, but we do have a web store product. So like the Capcom Creator store, for example, that's web store.

Yane An: Amazing. How do you guys choose what creators to work with actually? Do they have to like hit a certain amount of like influence? Yeah.

Justin Sacks: it's up to the publisher. So the publisher has a bunch of con controls over their creator program. So the first one is around who can be a part of it. And so the first step is it can be an open program where any creator can come in and. Join it, you know, be a part of it, get their creator code, all that sort of stuff.

The second piece is an application based program where the creator comes and they attach their TikTok, their YouTube, their Twitter, whatever it might be, and then the publisher gets to approve them or reject them and say, yes, this person's a fit. No, this person isn't a fit. Or they can have a closed programmer.

They can say, Hey, these few dozen creators are the people that we want to be in a part of it. And then we can extend invites for them to come and join. So the, the publisher has all those controls. They also have controls over the core perk, which is that revenue share perk. And so the first one is like, You can have creator groups, so you can incentivize different creators.

So you could say, Hey, if you made 20 hours of content over the last month, then you can be in the platinum tier. And then you get special perks there. Or they can say, Hey, you've been making really great content that we approve of. We're gonna put you in this special tier. The second control that publishers have is around SKUs, so in live service games, You might really wanna incentivize a player to buy a battle pass, for example.

And so you can give enhanced revenue share for a battle pass SKU, but maybe less for a hard currency for someone just buying like the endgame currency. And then the last piece is time. You can change that revenue share for a weekend or a new season launch or whatever it might be. And so long answer to question, which creators we work with, it's totally up to the publisher and then we support them.

On, you know, what are their goals for the game. And those that support can be anything from helping a prospect, the right creator to engaging with that creator to bringing them in. But we have a bunch of best practices and recommendations, but we put the ultimate control in the hands of the publisher.

Yane An: Exactly. All right. Amazing. Do you see any, like general trends in the gaming industry that you guys are like looking out for, paying attention to these days?

Justin Sacks: Yeah, I think there's a really interesting juxtaposition between the idea that creators can become more niche while at the same time, the power law of content creation is becoming more true.

So like the first one, you know, like basically the internet broadly has enabled people with really specific interests; like, they collect, you know, like Nintendo 64 cartridges that were lost, you know, in the late nineties. If you have like some super specific niche interest, there's now a huge community that you can find because the internet has connected all the people with similar interests.

And I think creators have followed that. Where you can play Pokemon Kaizo emulators, and have thousands of viewers because all of the people that, that's their favorite thing in the world to watch. They didn't have someone to watch and now they do. So I think, I think that is becoming true.

Well, it's also becoming true that the biggest creators have even more advantages than they've ever had before, where the top 0.01% probably makes more money than the next 80% of creators. And it's odd to think that both of those can be true at the same time. I don't really know what to take from that concept, but it's just a thing that I think through.

I also do think there's something interesting around creator platforms and how there's been the consistent tension between does do creators cbring the viewers Or does the platform bring the viewers. This is what we saw with like the Mixer stuff when it happened.

This is what we're seeing now with the dissemination of, there's a bunch of new platforms popping up and some of 'em are paying a bunch of money to creators. It's like, will that work? Or is it really about having some new way of experiencing content? And even that is a question like TikTok is enormously successful.

It's the most successful new platform in five years or whatever it is, but like, was it successful because of its algorithm and cuz of the content delivery? Like yes, but also Bytedance spent a literal billion dollars of marketing it and that's a lot of money to spend on trying to make a new platform and it's just a weird thing to think through of what is gonna happen.

And I don't know, it's things that we have to pay attention to cuz like our mission is to empower as many creators as possible through commerce and it's important to understand, you know, what drives them, what challenges are they facing and what things are they excited about. But I know our solution is not to be the next content platform.

We're not going to be a better Twitch.We're not going to be the distribution platform. We're just going to be the piece that that helps their lives to be better.

Yane An: Yeah. I guess regardless of the evolution of these social platforms, your guys' product is great.

Justin Sacks: It's why we want to be agnostic and like if, if we're built only on Twitch for example, like be really challenging because who knows what will happen with Twitch more broadly or maybe Twitch wants to build whatever we build internally. And so for us to be agnostic, but also creators' audiences live in many places now. I mean, most classically, if you're on a YouTube, a Twitch, you might have a little bit of an audience on the other platform, but you're definitely gonna have a Twitter, you're gonna have community. You're gonna have a bunch of touch points with your community.

And so like, we should support you wherever your audience is.

Yane An: Yeah. In case people go stream on uh Kick, right? Ha ha.

Justin Sacks: Who

Yane An: Yeah.

Justin Sacks: knows.

Yane An: Who knows.

Interesting musings, food for thought about creators, the creator economy.

You said there's a couple of future things coming along the pipeline for Nexus. What are your guys' future plans or like projections as you continue into the industry?

Justin Sacks: Yeah, so I can talk a bunch about that. I'll start super high level and then I'll get to specific features and roadmap.

Super high level. The very, very initial focus is on technical enablement. How do we make it easier for a publisher to integrate with us? There's basically like two pieces.

They have to do an API integration, which is really, really lightweight. Usually less than two dev hours. And then there's the UI integration of how do they actually put this inside of the game. And that can take a little bit of time, sometimes a week or a couple weeks. And so we spent a bunch of time building STKs within Unity and Unreal building sample projects, building documentation to make that even easier. And now one of the things that we're doing is partnering with external dev shops that do the entire integration for a publisher. And all the publisher has to do is bring it into master. So the first focus right now is enablement, making it easier publishers to work with us.

The second focus will be a better self-serve experience for current customers. And that current is the most important word there. And really what that means is…Let's say you want to run an activation where you do 10% more revenue share for creators for a weekend. If, let's say the game is doing some big launch that weekend or comes out with some new battle pass or whatever it is; if they want do that today, they have to tell us, they have to be in our Slack and be like: “Hey, we wanna do this thing. Canyou set that up?” And then our team will go into the database and change it and make sure that that's set and prepared to happen. The publisher should have full control and should have the ability to like decide and then actually execute on any of the activations that they want to do.

And they should have greater fidelity of the data through the program. So making that self-serve part a better experience. And then eventually we'll be the actual self-serve experience if you're not yet a partner with Nexus. Today, if you want to have a creator program, we might say no because we can only handle a few partners at a time right now in, in terms of onboarding new ones. So if you're not exactly the right game that'll find a lot of value and like, make a ton of sense for us to work together today,

We might have to say we can only help you in the future and that's because we have to manually onboard you. We have to build a bunch of the different tools and it takes us some time in order to launch a new partner. But that doesn't have to be true. There is an entirely possible self-serve experience.

Where any game, whether it's a tiny indie game or a large AAAgame can come to Nexus and build and launch and maintain their own creator program without ever talking to a human. We just have to build those things that, like self-serve, get your own API key sort of stuff. And that, that is like once the product is really, really working for our partners.

That's probably not until 2024. So that's high level specific features. One of the things we just hit code complete on, and we'll see which partner we're gonna launch it with first is a Refer-A-Friend.

Justin Sacks: The creator code stuff that we provide is incredible again, for creator retention.

It's a great fit for any game that's already out, that already has a player base, that already has a creator base. But let's say you're a new game and you're really focused on user acquisition, on getting new players to join your game. One of the tools that can be really helpful is refer-a-friend. Both for influencers so that they can refer their audience in and get rewards, but also just for general players.

And it was straightforward for us to just add that to the platform we've already built because it uses a lot of the same tools and dashboarding and infrastructure. so we've launched that, and there's a bunch of fun little things you can incentivize people to refer in a specific type of player.

So you can give someone a reward, whether that's an in game reward or an out of game like dollar reward for saying, not just  getting 10 players to join the game, but it might be“refer 10 players who reach level 20 and join a guild and built a castle,” because once someone does those things, they're a really valuable player.

Or hey, refer five friends who play at least 10 matches with you. That's really powerful for games that need a little bit more education for the new player experience. We're mimicking what Fortnite has done again, because they built an incredible refer a-friend system., which is the rewards you get for referring a friend is after playing with that friend, cuz they know if you play with a friend, you're way more likely to stick around.

So that's one product. One thing we're working on that we're experimenting with, so I don't want to guarantee will exist, is the thing we're calling “campaigns”, which will basically help folks doing more traditional influencer marketing, pay out wider swathes of creators. It gets really challenging if you're doing traditional influencer marketing to work with more than a dozen creators because they get to the point that you're paying them less than what it actually costs you to execute. So like if you're paying someone $50 to do a stream or make a video or something, it'll actually cost you more to even send out the payments or to handle the taxes or whatever it is

Yane An: Ah, yeah.

Justin Sacks: but,

Yane An: see. Yeah.

Justin Sacks: But at Nexus we already do all that stuff.

So what if we can make it really easy to work with hundreds of creators at a time or thousands of creators on a campaign? Basically, the point of Nexus is a creator program in a box. All the things that you need to manage a world-class creator program should be part of the platform; part of the systems.

And so those are the sort of features that we're thinking about.

Yane An: Yeah, that's a lot of amazing integrations down the work. User acquisition seems to be a, a pretty tricky one. So yeah, hopefully that, that launches without a hitch. A lot of other platforms also do user acquisition, like, off the top of my head, for example, like Twitch Prime, right?

It's like, oh, you can redeem this item if you, if you sign up for a game and stuff. So I sort of wonder like what do you guys think is like your unique selling point slash like, what sets you apart from that?

Justin Sacks: Again, it's the refer-a-friend piece. It's straightforward for us to add into the API that we already have as part of the dashboarding and infrastructure that we built. And it's a thing that pretty much every game should have some sort of referral system built into it. But if you look around, many games don't and it's because there is no off the shelf solution.

It's kind of wild that there's not some generic thing you can manipulate within Unity or in Unreal to just have your own referral system, but it is like sort of a backend touching thing, which is hard. And so we figured we might as well offer it to these games and we'll learn if it's particularly valuable.

I am not saying we're shifting our focus into being more UA or that we're solving for any things that some of the other awesome platforms do. It's just that specific feature of most games, most game publishers think to themselves like, “Hey, it would be nice if we had a refer-a-friend system and then they have some PM go and figure out, well what would it take in order to build it?”

And they're like, look, it's probably not worth it for us to do.

Yane An: Right.

Justin Sacks: And if Nexus can just give you that as part of what we do and it's really simple to integrate, then we should probably think about it and probably do so. It's similar to our core creator program product. Every single live service publisher is having conversations around creator programs.

They're like, I wish we had one, but then they're like, but our finance team would have to figure out the updating of which creator's owed what, and then actually sending out those payments, they'd be really upset. Our engineering team has literally negative roadmap and has no time in order to build like the actual infrastructure to connect.

When a player is supporting a creator, we then need to have an evergreen influencer team in order to manage it.That's the whole point of Nexus… we'll just do all that stuff for you and just build the best game you can.

Yane An: Yeah. And then Gamesight will hand out the influencer discovery, so

Justin Sacks: That's totally, that's the, partnership.

Yane An: You guys are already branching out into new technologies, especially with your new vR partnership. Right. Definitely think now with like Apple entering the VR space with their $3,500 headset, everyone's favorite.

Yeah. It's definitely going to become a lot more mainstream. And, VR was the newest craze like 10 years ago, I guess, and then people like sort of lost hope in it and now it's back again. So yeah, we'll see how the industry moves in the future

Justin Sacks: There's a term, fence sitting, which is like when you won't take a stance either way. And I love to do that and I think that's actually like a good thing to do for a startup generally. But this is why we're platform agnostic.

So I talked a lot about being agnostic to the content platforms. We'll work with a creator, whether you're on Twitch or YouTube, or you have a big Twitter audience or a Discord community or whatever it is. We're happy to partner with you. But we'll also partner with game publishers agnostic to whatever distribution platform they're on PC through Steam, they have their own launcher.

They're on one of the consoles, they're on mobile, they're in VR. We're happy to support you. And I think that's really important because. Just like how creators have audiences amongst different platforms, games are becoming very much multi-platform and effectively every console and even your phone is, they're all computers and they're all kind of able to solve the same things that like most games will probably be multi-platform that are live service in the future.

So I'm rooting for Apple VR because I think it'll be awesome to experience. But we're happy to support a game no matter where they're being distributed.

Yane An: Yes. I love that.

Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to plug or shout out for Nexus?

Justin Sacks: Probably two things actually. So one games that we should focus on and support. We're really focused on live service games that already have a player base in a community and a creator community. But if you know of one of them or you work at one of them, or you're supporting any of them, we'd love to talk with them and see if we could help.

And then two, right now we have one open position to join the company if you're truly exceptional reach out anyways and I'll have to work with you in some way. But we are hiring for a Head of Sales, so if you've sold awesome infrastructure technology into game publishers and you've worked at tiny startups before, please reach out because I'd love to talk to you.

Yane An: Yeah, Nexus needs you. Thank you again so much for being a guest. Learned a lot of interesting stuff, a lot of exciting stuff to see. You come from like all the way from the beginnings of like Curse all the way to now. And here you are supporting creators and I love to see how the creator economy went from like an indie industry to like today, right? The gaming community and the industry have really become something and we always love to see that. So yeah. Good things at Nexus.

Justin Sacks: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.