Popular streamer Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins was allegedly paid $1 million USD by games publisher EA in a bid to promote their new IP Apex Legends on its launch day, according to a source reported by Reuters. The deal apparently required the streamer to both tweet about Apex and play a few hours on his Twitch channel, which may have helped over 10 million players to sign up to the game in the first three days.
Whilst Ninja was a massively contributing factor to these statistics, he was not the only person employed by the giant publisher according to this report. Other notable streamers such as Michael 'Shroud' Grzesiek was also paid to help bolster the new battle royale's public outreach, however, the amount that Shroud was not disclosed.
Kevin Knocke, VP at esports organisation ReKTGlobal, spoke about the huge publicity campaign. "They did a fairly comprehensive job at pulling together all of the relevant game influencers in this genre," he said.
The campaign had supposedly managed to raise EA's stock price by 16%, or for a more relatable figure, a casual $4 billion. The popularity among streamers and influencers may have helped the game net over 50 million active players within its first month too, edging it ever closer to catch up to the titan of battle royale Fortnite, which currently has over 200 million active players.
Lead producer at Respawn Entertainment (the EA-owned studio that created Apex Legends) Drew McCoy spoke about why they choose to market the new release in the way they did, saying that "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".
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