This Streamer Was Offered $300k For One Stream
Asmongold, one of the top World of Warcraft streamers on Twitch, began posting clips of himself playing the game on his first YouTube channel back in 2008. After finally making the switch to livestreaming on Twitch in 2016, Asmongold built an audience of over 1.7 million followers on the platform. In addition, Asmongold, whose real name is Zack, is a founder of the OTK community, which includes fellow streamers Mizkif, Esfand, and Tipsout.
The engagement that comes with that kind of visibility is a valuable commodity to developers who want to expand a game's reach. Some companies are willing to pay a pretty penny for coverage, as Asmongold hinted at during a chat on his Twitch stream about partnered content. According to Asmongold, an unnamed company offered him a pretty large sum simply to stream a game.
"They offered to pay me over ... I'm not going to say what game it is ... over $300,000 to play the game in one day," he said. When a viewer on Twitch asked whether he took the deal, Asmongold explained that he told the company maybe and that he may still pursue the opportunity.
Big paydays have been an increasing part of the streaming landscape, and this isn't even the first time that Asmongold has received a massive offer to play a new game. In early 2020, he recorded a video in which he admitted that he was formerly under an NDA agreement to stream a game for more than $200,000.
While Asmongold did communicate a willingness to participate in a partnered stream with the right company, he also made clear his distaste for lazy game promotions by other streamers. Directly after he revealed how much the company offered him to stream a game for a day, he gently mocked other streamers with some fake promotion for AFK Arena, a game being heavily advertised by Lilith Games at the time.
Such a large cash offer for Asmongold's partnership led to some fan speculation about which company might want to work with him. One popular guess was miHoYo, the Chinese developer of the popular Genshin Impact. That title made $245 million in its first month, making it one of the largest mobile launches of all time.
The amount of money offered to Asmongold for a single day's worth of sponsored streaming gives some insight into the sort of figures that even bigger streamers can command. Make no mistake, there are Twitch stars who are insanely rich. Tyler Blevins, better known as Ninja, made around $500,000 every month in 2018, mainly stemming from the community built from his mega-popular Fortnite streams. While that is the extreme end of Twitch's earning potential, even streamers with more modest audiences can make enough to earn a living.
In fact, Ninja himself has received some pretty serious payouts for a single day of streaming. When Respawn Entertainment released Apex Legends in 2019, the game arrived without any significant advertising or hype that comes with most AAA titles. Instead, publisher Electronic Arts partnered with some of the biggest names on Twitch and other social media sites to stream the game and spread the word on its launch date of Feb. 4. Ninja was one of the streamers Electronic Arts partnered with, and a later report revealed that he received $1 million for streaming the game for a full day.
That gambit paid off for Apex Legends, however. The battle royale game saw over 50 million players log in during its first month. In contrast, it took Fortnite four months to reach 45 million players. While Fortnite may dominate the battle royale genre, Apex Legends' explosive growth remains impressive.
It isn't just new games that get a boost from increased exposure from influential streamers. One of the biggest games on Twitch in 2020, Among Us, was actually released in 2018 but languished in relative obscurity for over a year. Once high-profile streamers such as Sodapoppin and xQc began featuring the game on their channels, it took off. In a Kotaku interview, the developers declined to give any actual numbers about sales figures but did state that Among Us' popularity had led to "50 times more sales than any deal or event they've hosted in the past."
Clearly, a bet on streamers and their expansive communities is one that can pay off in a big way. As long as streamers can deliver that kind of attention, companies will be willing to offer them massive partnerships. Don't be surprised if you see Asmongold spending a whole day playing something besides World of Warcraft soon.