Influential marketing in the gaming market is pricey. However, cooperation with live streamers and a clear understanding of the audience on Twitch and YouTube make it possible to lower the expenses for gaining new players. 

TripPlan started working with a popular MMO military game with over 70 million registered players to revive interest and attract new players who have not tried it yet. Alas, we can’t name it clearly, but it’s not hard to guess because there are not many games with ships and airplanes. Let’s find out what results we’ve achieved in five months.

Too much to pay for a new player, and what we did with that

We started upgrading influential marketing for the MMO in May 2024. The main goal of the campaign was to boost interest in the game and attract new players with the help of gaming streamers and other live content creators on Twitch and YouTube.

At the very beginning, the price for a new player was about €35. This was just for downloading the game, even if a person deleted it after ten minutes of playing. Influential marketing has never been a cheap way to promote computer games, but the price was too high for effective promotion. 

So, we cooperated with mid-tier streamers with 500-1000 viewers each. During live streams on Twitch and YouTube Live, content creators ran the game, shared impressions with their audiences, and asked viewers to play together. Live streams were branded by an overlay banner with special offers for new players and those who used to play earlier but abandoned the game. Creators got bonus money for each game installed through streamers’ affiliate links. This greatly motivated creators to attract more people to the game. Also, our way of communicating with streamers and managing the campaign greatly increased LTV.

What results we’ve got after five months of promotional campaign

The campaign is still going on after five months of advertising. We don’t want to stop it because Twitch and YouTube promotion brings measurable results. 

For comparison, the average user acquisition cost for a mobile game in 2024 is between $2 and $6.

Influence marketing is a bit more complicated than targeting or pop-up ads, but it shouldn’t cost that much.

TrapPlan started running ads with the help of nine live streamers. Content creators tried games when live streaming, shared their impressions with the audience, and gently drew attention to the game by giving affiliate links that granted additional in-game bonuses. We also used an overlay banner on the stream page to count installs. If a streamer achieves the objectives, they get money bonuses.

The target audiences were the US, Germany, France, and Hungary.

The Intermediate Results of the Campaign

Our advertising campaign in YouTube and Twitch live streams is still on air. That’s a simple strategy, but it worked well. Neither we nor our client are going to stop it because it’s effective. Still, we’d like to show some actual results in plain numbers.

We achieved a CPI of €12 per new player, down from €50, reduced the fraud rate to 9%, and reached a 2-week LTV of 43.11%, not to mention the in-game spending, though we cannot disclose that.

We accomplished these results over eight months of working together, with a 45% budget increase each month while maintaining performance despite significant manual work.

Why should it be manual? Any automation doesn’t work with creators. We’ve tried and learned this the hard way. Only individual campaigns and manual monitoring of effectiveness can bring satisfactory results.

Will we stop? Not at all. Just now, influence advertising started showing results compared with traditional promotion tools. The price for a new player continues to lower, so overall efficiency hasn’t reached its peak even slightly.

And it’s just confirmed stats. The live-streaming promotional campaign impacted brand management and game awareness, and it was the first active contact for further advertising campaigns for gaming audiences.