{"id":1008703,"date":"2026-01-10T17:43:29","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T17:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.polygon.com\/?p=467688"},"modified":"2026-01-10T17:43:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T17:43:29","slug":"the-strange-evolution-of-the-sponsored-stream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/the-strange-evolution-of-the-sponsored-stream\/","title":{"rendered":"The strange evolution of the sponsored stream"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Push to Talk is a weekly newsletter about the business of making and marketing video games, written by games industry veteran and marketing director Ryan Rigney. Subscribe here<\/a> for eclectic and spicy interviews and essays in your inbox every Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There are currently 2,679 playable (for free!) demos for upcoming games on Steam as part of Steam Next Fest \u2014 a feast for players and a horrifying statistic if you\u2019re hoping to launch a game next year.<\/p>\n

Valve knows that\u2019s entirely too many game demos, so they\u2019ve posted a live scoreboard<\/a> where you can see the most played and wishlisted demos.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

All throughout this week, two games have jostled for the #1 and #2 spots: Delta Force<\/em><\/a> by Team Jade (a branch of TiMi, a subsidiary of Tencent) and SUPERVIVE<\/em><\/a> by Theorycraft Games (a startup formed by a ton of former League of Legends <\/em>devs). It\u2019s a clash of the Tencent vs. Ex-Tencent titans.<\/p>\n

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Theorycraft is very well-funded<\/a> by startup standards and headed by longtime LoL<\/em> front man Joe Tung, who also once led production on Destiny<\/em> and some of the best Halo <\/em>games. So it\u2019s not a huge surprise to see them land near the top of the heap with their first big outing.<\/p>\n

But at the same time, it\u2019s not<\/em> obvious that having a lot of money would result in a widely played demo during Steam Next Fest. In 2024 game studios with astonishingly huge budgets<\/a> are regularly failing to break out with players.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the secret?<\/p>\n

One small thing the SUPERVIVE <\/em>team did was invest in Reddit ads. I\u2019ve never seen anyone do this for a demo, but it seems to have paid off with a ton of positive engagement. Even the comments on the ads<\/a> were nice.<\/p>\n

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Theorycraft Games Head of Marketing Alex Goepfert put it mildly when he told me in a Discord DM this week that \u201cWhen you can run ads on Reddit, leave the comments open (which no one ever does), and not cry when you read the responses, that\u2019s an encouraging signal.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the far more important signal the Theorycraft team has long been focused on has been the reaction to SUPERVIVE<\/em> by content creators. They\u2019ve been inviting creators from the League<\/em> community and others to playtest SUPERVIVE<\/em> for years at this point \u2014 including long before the game was revealed publicly.<\/p>\n

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\u201cA consistent focus for us is building authentic partnerships with creators who speak directly to our target audience and genuinely enjoy the game,\u201d Goepfert says.<\/p>\n

The Theorycraft team playtested with creators and incorporated their notes while building SUPERVIVE<\/em>. So when they sponsored some streams alongside their demo launch, many of the creators playing already knew their way around the game. The result has been a bunch of paid and organic creator endorsements for SUPERVIVE <\/em>that all feel genuine:<\/p>\n

\u201cCaedrel going bonkers on stream<\/a> after a big team fight or Tyler1 telling his audience the game is \u2018actually good\u2026\u2019<\/a> these are the types of core memories we\u2019re chasing as we introduce the game and studio to players,\u201d Goepfert says.<\/p>\n

So the SUPERVIVE <\/em>campaign is probably on the cutting edge of what a good, well-funded creator marketing campaign looks like for a game launch (and certainly<\/em> for a demo).<\/p>\n

But recently I\u2019ve been thinking in a sort of bigger picture way about the whirlwind transformation of the relationship between game devs and creators over the past ten years or so, because things have changed really <\/em>fast.<\/p>\n

Since 2014 we\u2019ve basically gone through three distinct phases or eras in the ways that game developers and marketing teams have thought about content creators \u2014 and particularly Twitch streamers and YouTubers.<\/p>\n

2014-2018: The Random Partnerships Era<\/h2>\n

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People have been posting videos about video games \u2014 and, in the early 2010s, livestreaming them \u2014 for a long time. But if I had to pick any date as the official start of the modern \u201cgaming creator\u201d era, I\u2019d go with August 25, 2014, when Amazon surprised the world by purchasing Twitch for $970 million<\/a> in a cash-money deal.<\/p>\n

At the time, this valuation was seen as absurdly high by analysts. Was Amazon buying Twitch for the tech so it could better compete with Netflix and YouTube? Sure, the platform was drawing a lot of eyeballs \u2014 Twitch reported 55 million monthly active users in July of 2014 \u2014 but it wasn\u2019t obvious what sort of business you could run with it.<\/p>\n

It also wasn\u2019t clear how game developers should act toward creators. Some of them were doing weird stuff and flouting trademark protections! Do you ignore them? If you\u2019re Nintendo, do you sue them<\/a>?<\/p>\n

It was understood that streamers and YouTubers were helpful for getting new players and keeping old ones engaged, but what do you do<\/em> for them? A telling factor in the game dev approach to creators in this era was the term we universally used to refer to them: influencers<\/em>. This was always a cringey marketing term, but it revealed the widespread (and not always wrong) belief among marketing departments that the people watching streamers and YouTubers would believe whatever creators said and take their opinions as their own.<\/p>\n

At this point, a lot of game devs sort of defaulted to treating creators like mini-celebrities: flying them out to events, sending them gifts, and trying \u2014 often with terrible results \u2014 to turn them into semi-official spokespeople for their games.<\/p>\n

One funny example: Back in 2018 when I was working on PUBG<\/em>, it was decided that we should partner with Shroud and Dr Disrespect (I know, I know<\/em>) to put official Shroud and Doc gun skins in the game.The deal was signed, the gun skins were made, and I had personally written the official announcement post<\/a>, which was scheduled to go out the following Monday. That\u2019s when Doc went off-script and posted the following tweet:<\/p>\n

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He was pre-emptively recontextualizing a mutually agreed-upon partnership with the PUBG <\/em>team (then called Bluehole) as us falling to our knees and giving in to his petulant demands<\/em>. And he called us \u201cBlueballs.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought it was insane but ultimately harmless and more than a little funny.2<\/sup> Not everyone agreed. We launched the gun skins anyway.<\/p>\n

2019-2023: The Big Money Lottery Ticket Era<\/h2>\n

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On February 4th, 2019, Respawn Entertainment revealed and<\/em> surprise-launched Apex Legends<\/em>. Suddenly the game was everywhere \u2014 basically every FPS streamer was on it, and hundreds of thousands of people were watching.<\/p>\n

It was a ballsy gambit, but it worked. Exactly one month later, on March 4th, Respawn announced that the game had hit 50 million players:<\/p>\n

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