Naraka: Bladepoint leverages top streamers to reel in fans

Naraka: Bladepoint is taking a new spin on the battle royale genre by focusing on samurai-style fighting, as opposed to gun shooting. But just like many before it, the game’s publisher implemented the strategic use of sponsored streams with top content creators to gain exposure.

The game was officially released on Wednesday, Aug. 11. And over the weekend, a handful of top streamers, including Sodapoppin, Lirik, Shroud, Summit1g, and TheGrefg, tried it out.

While most top streamers had sponsored stream segments that lasted around two hours, Sodapoppin and Lirik gave the game a little bit of bonus exposure by playing it for a few more hours.

Shroud, Lirik, and Summit1g led the charge on Friday, Aug. 13 by playing in a group together for a few hours. The trio spent a combined 14 hours of broadcast time playing the game on Twitch racking up more than 306,000 hours watched, according to viewership tracker SullyGnome.

The sponsored content was promoted and Naraka also produced customized items for each of the content creators to fit their brand that players can find in the game’s item shop.

But that wasn’t the end of the activity for Naraka over the weekend. On Sunday, Aug. 15, Sodapoppin had a two-hour sponsored block of his stream to play the game. And instead of stopping once the advertisement was over, he kept playing—for 10 more hours.

With 268,000 hours watched, Sodapoppin averaged more than 22,000 viewers over the course of 12 hours playing Naraka. But perhaps the most interesting part of his content came at the beginning of his sponsored stream.

Instead of being all about the action involved in a fighting battle royale game, Sodapoppin’s stream was highlighted by the absurd levels of customization that he could achieve while setting up his character.

While his playing partner and close friend Nick Polom took a simplistic approach in creating his character, Sodapoppin went out of his way to push the boundaries of what was possible to create.  

Overall, the game has racked up just more than two million hours watched since its release just less than a week ago. It’s probably not going to shake up the platform too much, but for a game that costs $19.99 on Steam, the exposure top streamers supplied over the weekend could provide a reasonable return on investment in the form of game copies sold.