Popular streamers are getting paid tens of thousands of dollars by publishers to play and stream new games on their channels. That figure can reach up to an hourly payout for streamers of up to $50,000. Perhaps the most high-profile case of this happening in recent memory was the report that top streamer Ninja earned $1 million for playing Apex Legends when it launched.

While this is not a new practice within the gaming industry, it certainly seems to be picking up steam and becoming a more regular marketing tool used by publishers to support the launch of their games. According to this new report by The Wall Street Journal, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Take-Two are some of the publishers who are now committing millions of marketing dollars to pay streamers to play a new game at launch.

It was a noticeable occurrence around the launch of Apex Legends in February 2019, with a vast group of streamers being sponsored (or said plainly, paid) to play the new battle royale game from EA developer Respawn Entertainment. It's likely that not every streamer was paid as highly as a streamer like Ninja but payments can still be considerable.

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The Wall Street Journal spoke to Reed Duchscher with Night Media Inc. (a company that manages and represents some streamers), who said publishers are looking to streamers who can pull more than 15,000 concurrent viewers on a stream. Streamers with this size audience can earn $25,000 to $35,000 per hour, said Duchscher.

Paying streamers top dollar to get in front of their audience looks to only be increasing, with Take-Two planning to pay streamers this fall to feature Borderlands 3 and Ubisoft doing the same for Ghost Recon Breakpoint. This non-traditional marketing method is obviously proving to be an effective way for publishers to advertise directly target audiences and get lots of eyes on their games, with John Benyamine, an executive at a marketing agency that connects publishers with streamers, telling The Wall Street Journal, “If you don’t have live-streaming as part of your marketing spend, you’re doing it wrong."

Source: The Wall Street Journal