Top gamer
paid $1m to play video game
What are a few hours playing videogames and a handful of
tweets worth? $1 million if you are Tyler Blevins, known to millions as “Ninja,”
the world’s most-followed computer gamer.
Blevins was one of a few select professionals with huge
followings pulled in by videogame giant Electronic Arts Inc to play and promote
its latest title, “Apex Legends,” in the first hours of the launch last month,
generating a buzz that notched 10 million signups in the first three days.
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The 27-year-old, famous for his hair color changes –
currently a bright, turquoise hue – tweeted about the free-to-play game early
on Feb. 5 and streamed the action to his more than 13 million followers on
game-streaming site Twitch. For this he was paid around $1 million, a source
told Reuters.
The amount underlines the increasingly cut-throat fight for
dominance of the free-to-play battle royale genre that, through Epic Games’
global smash hit “Fortnite”, has pushed major publishers like Electronic Arts
to change how they do business.
Representatives for EA and Ninja declined to comment on how
much he had been paid, but the amount named by the source is more than twice
media reports of Ninja’s monthly earnings from streaming his regular
appearances on Fortnite and way above what was speculated on a number of
internet discussion boards.
EA also paid popular Polish-Canadian streamer “Shroud,” who
has nearly six million Twitch followers, to play Apex Legends but declined to
disclose the terms of the deal.
“They did a fairly comprehensive job at pulling together all
of the relevant game influencers in this genre,” said Kevin Knocke, a vice
president at esports infrastructure firm ReKTGlobal.
“This was a really well coordinated poaching of the top
influencers the likes of which has not been seen so far in esports,” he said,
suggesting that EA had also roped in streamers better-known for playing other
blockbusters like “Call of Duty” or “PUBG”.
The Ninja deal also points to the growing possibilities for
teenagers who grow up hooked in their bedrooms on the industry’s big titles, as
well as a shift in promotional strategy, with the use of popular gamers
replacing expensive TV ad campaigns.
EA’s stock price and market value rose 16 percent, or $4
billion, in the three days after Apex Legends launched and a month later the
game has 50 million users, a quarter of Fortnite’s 200 million.
“We really wanted to create a day where you couldn’t escape
Apex if you cared about games and we wanted it to feel like an event was
happening everywhere around the globe on that day,” Drew McCoy, lead producer
at the EA studio that created Apex Legends, said in an interview.
“We had streamers from all over Europe, LatAm, North
America, Korea, Japan so that we could get our message out there and people
would see the game,” he said.
Joost van Dreunen, co-founder of Nielsen-owned gaming
research firm SuperData, estimated that in 2018 Fortnite raked in $2.4 billion
in revenue, more than any other single title. (NAN)