Tyler Blevins, aka the professional streamer we all know as Ninja was one of
the few lucky gamers, chosen to test out Fortnite’s rival in Apex Legends.
Ninja has a high presence within the gaming industry so it does make sense
why he was chosen to take the reigns of the game in its early release phase
and getting it promoted to the gaming industry.
The amount paid to Ninja himself just goes to show, not only how confident
EA are in their game to rival Fortnite itself, but a real intent as how they are
changing their approach to future releases. When the game was in its early
release phase they did also pitch the game to Polish-Canadian streamer
Shroud, he like ninja has a huge fan base in stream service Twitch, but we do
not know the terms of his deal with EA.
EA hiring Ninja is showing their new approach to promoting games, in that
Ninja is very well known in the gaming industry and again having a huge
twitch following fan base. He is also known for similar sort of game play, in
that he is well known for his call fo duty streams and also PUBG. It also
captivates the audience he regularly receives in that its teenagers who are to
use to his gameplay and those that are hooked on the games he plays.
When initially looking at it, paying someone a million dollars to stream a game
does seem quite a high figure, however when you look deeper into the
marketing side of things and how EA’s profits worked out, all in all it seems
like it was money well spent. Their stocks rose 16 percent or 4 billion dollars
however you want to look at it, this was three days after the game itself was
released. They also found that a month after the game releasing it had 50
million users, a quarter of fortnite’s 200 million followers. From this I would
say if they continue promoting the game the way are, their target audience
could match or even better that set by Fortnite.
They did the right thing in that when it was first released, it was almost like
you couldn’t escape someone talking about Apex Legends or something
popping up online about the game itself. They had streams of the game
coming from the likes of Europe, North America, Korea and Japan that day so
that gamers could see the game in its element where nothing else could
overlook it.
Overall I have said it before and will say it again, I believe EA did the right
thing in not only hiring Ninja to promote their competitor but paying him the
fee they have done. It has only made Apex Legends stand out more then
anyone could have ever hoped for. If the game is to continue its success, I
could see a real change in the winds and almost see Fortnite having to pull
something really special out of the bag to keep gamers entertained.
