The definitive primer for publishers and developers on striking deals with influencers

gamesindustry.biz:

Navigating the world of influencer partnerships can be daunting for game publishers and developers, but a well-structured deal can create an invaluable, campaign-defining activation that makes the difference between a game arriving to modest fanfare or becoming an unignorable, widespread presence in gaming culture.

Strategic deployments with content creators simply hold too much potential to ignore when launching a game, particularly as budgets continue to tighten for the vast majority of teams through the foreseeable future.

While every campaign is unique, there are common concepts within these negotiations developers and publishers of all sizes should keep in mind as they consider activations in 2024 and beyond. Gamesight has had the privilege of collaborating with thousands of creators across top platforms, including TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube.

Here are five key strategies I've learned from over a decade working in influencer marketing and supporting some of the most successful, renowned games released in the industry's modern era.

Qualifying your own game and knowing when it's ready for influencers to set you both up for success. Basic qualifiers are:

Ask yourself which influencers can you afford, and what deliverables can you achieve with that budget?

Your influencer marketing budget should reflect your overall objectives, whether performance-driven (clicks and conversions) or awareness-focused (views and engagement). Common goals and KPIs can guide your budgeting decisions; determine whether you're prioritizing:

There are many nuances to calculating this, but as a starting point you can multiply a streamer's average viewership by two – keep in mind, however, that streamers with larger followings will be in the five-figure range.

For Twitch streams, the industry standard to calculate payment is called "cost per viewer hour" or CPVH. This is when you pay for one viewer to watch a stream for one hour (extrapolated based on average viewership). For YouTube or short-form