If you’ve never heard of Twitch , it’s a streaming platform where you can watch other people play video games, interact with fellow fans and laugh as you see your favorite streamer fail to win at a rigged claw game.
To non-gamers it might sound crazy, but tens of thousands of people tune in everyday to watch a single streamer known as Lirik play video games for 6-8 hours each day. To see the impact that these top streamers have you only need to look at the sponsorships that they have and the impact they can have on the products and services that they mention.
Recently, Lirik played a claw game called Toreba . A company out of Tokyo, Japan has setup video cameras in an arcade claw/crane game and programmed it so that you can control the game from across the world.
As with any of these games, the odds are stacked against you to ensure that the company makes money and the cost of playing is high. In fact, it seems the average cost of playing just once is $1.80.
After playing the game only a few times, the company has experienced an unprecedented surge in traffic and is “currently experiencing congestion delays” with their shipping. Just a few mentions of this game has caused it to spread like wildfire, to the point that the company is struggling to keep up with the demand.
We watched live the first time that Lirik played and very few of the machines were in-use, now, even in the early hours of the morning a large proportion of the machines are being played and some are down for maintenance.
Larger corporations are starting to recognize the brand power that streamers hold and seem to be increasing their sponsorship budgets across the platform. As one of the biggest streamers in the world, Lirik holds a unique position that allows him to attract sponsorship from a huge range of companies.
The one thing that we can learn from this is that streamers, YouTubers and other online celebrities are gaining more fame and power than ever before. It’s easy to underestimate these guys and girls as video game players, but when you see YouTubers getting car sponsorships and streamers causing a Japanese claw game company to go into overload, the world becomes a weird place.
LirikH