Can influencers’ games succeed?

Streamers making games, what can go wrong?

If you’ve got a following, you can leverage that into so many different ways of making money. Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS is worth $4B, Ryan Reynolds sold Mint Mobile for $1.35B, and I’m starting a line of zero-whitecast mineral sunscreens based on the viral success of my Substack. In short, when you’ve got the fanbase to funnel toward a product you create, success tends to follow. 

Every brand vies for celebrities to tout their stuff, but there’s a divide between paid influencer marketing and influencers marketing their own wares. The former is normally specific and short term: the celeb will film an ad that runs for a month or post three stories to his Instagram over the course of a week. Sometimes there’s a mismatch in audience locations (his avid fans are on TikTok, but the ad runs on TV). There’s also normally an ick factor that goes with paid influencer ads. When creators share their own products, however, they can do so on any of their platforms, directly to their core followers, as much as they want, and often in a way that feels more natural (casually wearing the hoodie from his new line in a post, rather than mentioning it). 

Either way, having a known face show off a product is powerful. Making good products, however, can be a bit more challenging, particularly if it’s something complex like a game. If consumer sentiment sours on a product, the average paid advertising person gets away unscathed since their campaign was limited and products can be recalled or discontinued. Games are a bit harder to rectify or sweep under the table.

But creator tools like Epic’s UEFN are opening doors for individual builders—or smaller development teams—to piggyback off major AAA titles like Fortnite and create games. This is a boon to every group of friends that has wanted to make something with their own rules, every brand that wants to set up a metaverse experience. But now, that group of friends is five of the largest game streamers on the planet and their combined “brand” has a following of tens of millions of players, and we have a new category of game: the influencer game.

I think of this as a category different than the game-with-influencer face, like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood or even Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater line; games that align with celebrities from outside of gaming to benefit from brand awareness. Streamer games are something new: they’re games built by native game celebrities who were made famous only because they play games. In one sense, this sounds even more natural. Of course gaming content creators should be making games. But given that they’re a niche within the larger gaming world, as big as they may be, this sets up a new and somewhat riskier proposition for the creators and developers.

Ninja and his crew at Project VFN (formerly Project V until they were served C&D papers) aren’t the only game streamers building their own titles. Dr. Disrespect launched Midnight Society to build Deadrop, a web3-based extraction shooter, and he joins a whole list of streamers who have attempted or are planning to create games. Many of these games have failed. These creators have already done a great job of getting us to play other games and buy other products. Now the question is:

Can this new wave of games be successful? 

Is the game great? 

The creators’ games in development have a lot going for them in ease of distribution, but they’ve also got some unique hurdles to overcome. 

On the one hand, influencers are a huge part of what makes games successful. Particularly since the rise of Twitch, it’s nearly impossible for publishers to have a go-to-market strategy that doesn’t involve influencer campaigns, since it’s the primary way that many of us now discover new games. Sometimes, streamers are the only thing that lets a game find its footing. On the other hand, streamers can’t make something of nothing. If a game is horribly designed, even an influencer-led bump in performance won’t last long. 

This puts a lot of pressure on these streamer-created games to be not just passable, but be quite, quite good. They’ve got to compete for attention and playtime with the mainstream games that the creators normally show off to their audiences; games which are simultaneously benefitting from other paid marketing in addition to content from perhaps thousands of other streamers. Since a lot of these creators’ games are multiplayer, they’ve got to be good enough to convert player’s friends to make it worth it to switch from, let’s say, Warzone to Deadrop. If you’re a developer trying to do that without love from streamers, you’re already DOA.

And many of these titles are being built by new studios. Even with experienced developers at the helm, brand new studios are always high risk. The team hasn’t worked together before, the game concepts are new, and the primary creative input could be coming from someone who is very good at playing games but not necessarily great at creating them. Audiences will expect something that matches the quality of the experiences in which they’re used to watching their streamers engage. Any glitches or flubs shown on-stream can’t be written off by the creators by throwing some major publisher’s devs under the bus: the streamer will have own them in the moment. 

[Now, I’ll hedge my words here a bit. A notable name can make up for a lot of so-so game design.] 

Are fans enough?

Speaking of those audiences, even though the followings of individual streamers can be powerful, they’re often just a sliver of the fanbase of the games played by those creators. Ninja, who became famous through Fortnite, has 18.6M followers on Twitch, while the game itself has 250M monthly active players. Even combined with four other streamers (who of course have significant overlap in viewership), is the following of <10% of the Fortnite MAU enough to shift users out of the core game experience and into a separate Project V island with sustained engagement? 

Most big games have the benefits of being shared by many, many content creators. But will other streamers spend the time to show off games created by other creators, especially if they’re focused on touting their own?

A whole lotta baggage 

These influencers are also humans like any other, with flaws and failings. While brands are always terrified of aligning themselves with an influencer who may later be considered toxic, assuming they’ve spread the risk around enough, they’ll rally and be just fine because their brand is not of the influencer. But a game whose existence is because of a single creator doesn’t have much of a shield if that streamer does something controversial. Which they do. All. The. Time. 

The relationship between game and streamer, as much as it is bidirectional, is also fickle. Most streamers play more than one game because audiences get bored and games come and go. But when they’re incentivized to shove as many followers into a single game as possible, creators risk either neglecting their new games business or disenchanting their fanbase. The ability to adapt to the hottest new games is important for all creators; their identities can’t be tied up in single titles whose half-life they can’t control. Likewise, games normally want to spread their reach amongst influencers, to ensure that there are other ones willing to showcase the title if their flagship faces move onto something else. 

But these creators’ games set up a new and untested dynamic: 

1. The game’s success is exclusively tied to the creator’s success and standing 

2. And the streamer’s content must now be mostly tied to their game, successful or not

Now we’ve got a game whose identity is entirely wrapped up in the status of the streamer, and a streamer whose reputation is potentially undermined by shilling a bad game. 

Where we’re at

Most of the major creator-led games aren’t launched. Early signs of how they might do are hard to contextualize given how few examples there have been in the past. Dr. Disrespect’s genesis mint for Deadrop has only done $824k in aftermarket trading which, even in the current NFT market, is a bit of a snooze for such a brand name creator and pales in comparison to many, many other web3 gaming mints. (But perhaps this says less about his ability to champion a game and more about the struggle of shifting his core web2 gaming audience into blockchain-based games.) Ninja, Timthetatman, and co’s Project VFN is rocking 60k Twitter followers compared to 6.6M and 2.8M respectively (and neither of the first two has the project listed in his bio). 

Not great showings from some of the most powerful creators in gaming. But these two major examples—Project VFN and Midnight Society—are also tangoing with new monetization models that could help them survive where a traditional game couldn’t. Right now, Epic’s rev-share scheme for UEFN-based games like Project VFN is based solely on engagement, not on any in-game spend. If there’s one thing that that collection of five influencers knows, it’s how to drive engagement. Deadrop, meanwhile, is testing the waters with web3-based items, which we know can increase player spend and LTV. And the concept could be new enough to that it can compete with the big AAA games Dr. Disrespect’s audience spend the rest of their time playing.

I do hope that these games are successful, because I think it unlocks a new alternative form of game development: one that doesn’t have to rely on franchises, old IP, or huge upfront capital, but can rely on creators helping to fund and market cool new experiences to the fans that love them most. 

PS: A note about the cadence of Let’s Play. Gang! I’m starting a new adventure! Today is day one of me joining an incredible company. More on this to come, but suffice to say that the bandwidth I have to devote to our time together may be curtailed. I plan to keep publishing pieces, especially as innovation picks up again. That said, if our regular biweekly hangs get knocked into irregularity, please bare with me!