EA hasn’t been shy in the past about paying content creators on Twitch to play its games. And with the Apex Legends season four release today, the gaming giant is at it again.
Last February, Apex broke onto the scene with multiple weeks of more than 30 million hours watched on Twitch, something few games manage to do even once a year. A big part of that initial surge came from top influencers like shroud, Summit1g, and Ninja, among others, playing the title.
Since then, Apex hasn’t maintained the same sort of success as some might have expected. But whenever it’s time for new content to be released, the game sees a notable jump in viewership for a short period of time since influencers flock to the game boasting “#ad” in their title.
So far today, a slew of gamers, including streamer of the year Dr Disrespect, have announced that they’ll be playing Apex on stream—and more will likely join.
Last fall, EA showed no restraint during a content release enlisting an army of streamers to play Apex as an #ad for an evening. The company got the obvious FPS gamers like Disrespect, TimTheTatman, and xQc, but it also reached for people who tend to play games in other categories.
Along with the known top FPS streamers, EA had Grand Theft Auto V roleplay streamer Vader and variety streamer Sodapoppin in on the action.
The ability to get so many influencers to play the game made it so that Apex reached the widest audience possible and pushed other games down for an evening by poaching their top influencers.
It’s unclear if the developer will take as extreme of measures this time around, but it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone if it does.
