Gaming influencer marketing is maturing, with platforms developing distinct roles in campaign strategies and marketers increasingly focusing on performance metrics over follower counts. This shift comes as game publishers face a stark reality: creator campaigns with millions of views frequently generate minimal sales, resulting in a catastrophic return on investment when lacking proper measurement tools. 

When it comes to influencer marketing in gaming, the difference between marketing success and failure increasingly hinges on identifying which creators actually drive purchases rather than simply accumulating views.

Enter Gamesight, a company that serves as a marketing technology partner for PC and console game publishers seeking to understand which marketing efforts actually drive sales. The Seattle-based company aims to help hundreds of game developers—from indie studios to major publishers with decades-old titles like “RuneScape”—make informed decisions about their marketing spend, particularly in creator partnerships.

“At the end of the day, we’re a data and technology company and we point that data and technology at the very specific problem of video games marketing and help achieve campaign effectiveness and performance,” explains Adam Lieb, founder and CEO of Gamesight. “Steam broadly doesn’t provide data back to game developers. You send people into their platform, and then it’s a black box of what happens after that.”

As Adam points out, a lack of transparency created a problem for game marketers investing hundreds of thousands of dollars without knowing which efforts were generating returns.

The Data Streams Powering Gaming Intelligence

Today, Gamesight processes over 1.1 billion data points daily across three key data streams, creating a detailed view of the gaming marketing ecosystem:

The first stream focuses on game data itself. “People launching games, playing games, buying stuff in games, doing matches in games, like stuff that happens in games,” Adam explains. “And we’re connected with hundreds of games on a deep technical level.” This direct integration provides real-time visibility into player behaviors and in-game actions.

The second stream captures marketing data, tracking where publishers allocate their budgets across digital platforms. This includes spend on Facebook, YouTube, Google, TikTok, Reddit, and various influencer campaigns—essentially mapping the entire digital marketing footprint for each game.

The third crucial component is content creator data. Adam describes this as understanding “Twitch, YouTube, TikTok; What’s going on those platforms? What games are people playing? What are they saying about those games? What’s the performance when they play those games?” This intelligence reveals which creators generate meaningful engagement with specific game types.

The Game Ontology Approach

Rather than relying on surface-level metrics like follower counts or average views, Gamesight has developed a game ontology system that identifies patterns based on similar game features and characteristics.

“Games all have lots of things about them that make them similar or dissimilar to other games,” Adam notes. “This game is a free-to-play game, it’s a first-person shooter with sandbox features and a space sci-fi universe with co-op elements. And it’s available on Xbox and PC, but not PlayStation or whatever.”

This detailed classification allows Gamesight to analyze how creators perform when covering games with similar features to a client’s title, providing more predictive power than traditional metrics.

“A big part of what we do is we want to see when content creators make content about games that are similar to yours or that share those features, what happens, and what does performance look like? Because the best indicator of future performance is past performance.”

The High Stakes of Getting It Wrong

As Adam explains, the measurement approach becomes particularly valuable because creator marketing has the highest “boom-bust potential” among all marketing channels. While a poor-performing Google ad campaign might deliver 30% fewer results than expected, a bad creator partnership can result in literally zero return.

“The risk of really not using data and making a big investment, a big partnership is like a zero,” Adam warns. “A bad influencer, especially when we’re talking about a big one, a bad deal, you’re spending $100,000 on a big deal, and it’s just like a bad fit could result in zero.”

He cites examples where videos with millions of views generated only a handful of game sales—a devastating ROI for the publisher. By using data to identify the right partnerships, Gamesight helps companies avoid these costly mistakes.

“If the data can save you from making the 10% worst investments possible, it doesn’t even matter what else you do,” Adam emphasizes. “If you just cut off 10% of the bottom spend, the performance of your overall marketing is going to be so much higher.”

Matching the Right Creators to the Right Games

Gamesight’s database includes information on over 129 million gaming content creators, but understanding which types work best for different games is crucial. Adam explains that the approach varies based on the game’s size and goals.

“For an indie game, oftentimes it does skew towards bigger names, the more like celebrity-type stuff,” Adam notes. New, unknown games need the visibility that only larger creators can provide—just getting enough attention for people to consider the game is the first challenge.

For major releases, the strategy changes: “For a huge game, it tends to be all three. You can’t spend enough money; there’s not enough reach in just working with micro, niche content creators. It’s great, you should do it, but it’s not going to be enough.”

In terms of pure efficiency, however, Adam reveals: “If you’re talking about pure efficiency, like dollars in, dollars out, the middle tier tends to be the most efficient.” Mid-sized creators with engaged audiences deliver the best ROI, though they lack the scale for larger campaigns.

From Measurement to Global Launch Campaigns

While Gamesight began with a focus on measurement, they’ve expanded to help publishers execute complex creator campaigns, particularly for major game launches. Their expertise has become coordinating large-scale efforts involving hundreds or thousands of creators across multiple countries and platforms.

“Our special sauce, or at least the most common thing, is these big global game launches where we’re working with hundreds to thousands of content creators in multiple geos, multiple platforms. And that requires a ton of technology and data and sort of automation tools to be able to do that at scale,” Adam says.

One recent success story was their work on “Kingdom Come Deliverance 2,” which Adam describes as “one of the biggest hits so far this year.” The campaign featured platform-specific strategies—content that worked on TikTok differed from what succeeded on Twitch. The approach combined paid sponsorships with broader creator program initiatives to maximize visibility.

“It had different flavors all over the place. The types of content that really worked on TikTok were really different than what the Twitch and the live streaming ecosystem were,” Adam explains. “It was a big combination of kind of paid sponsored initiatives as well as a creator program, you know, earned. How do we get the kind of long tail of content creators involved with making really cool content and getting them access to the game?”

The Problem with Claiming to Use Metrics

Perhaps most revealing is Adam’s critique of what he calls marketers who claim to use metrics but don’t. He notes that while virtually all marketers now claim to make decisions based on data, many are focusing on the wrong metrics entirely.

“I think there are still way, way too many people that claim to be data-driven but look at followers, for example,” he says. “Or look at CPMs on any type of advertising basis as though that is some sort of marker of good advertising because you got a lower CPM on one channel than another. That’s just not even a particularly relevant input to determining whether a campaign is successful or not.”

This misplaced focus on surface-level metrics can lead to poor decision-making, even among marketers who believe they’re making informed choices. The difference, according to Adam, is looking at metrics that actually correlate with business outcomes rather than surface-level engagement.

New Directions in Creator Marketing

Recently passing the milestone of 50 employees, Gamesight has grown from a small measurement tool to a marketing partner for game publishers worldwide—all while maintaining its core mission: “to help good games grow.”

As the company continues to develop, it’s expanding its measurement capabilities with new tools, such as incrementality measurement, which provides an additional approach to understanding marketing effectiveness beyond traditional attribution.

“We just launched, just came out, and are sort of going into market as we speak, a new incrementality measurement tool which has been really awesome for a lot of our game publisher partners,” Adam explains. “Attribution is one form of measurement, and it works for some things really, really great. It doesn’t work for other things. Incrementality is what we think about as another tool in our tool belt as a measurement company.”

Gamesight is also launching new features to provide more detailed geographic breakdowns of creator audiences—information that is particularly useful for publishers whose games may not be available in every market.

“A new feature that’s rolling out will provide that answer. So just helps fit into the game marketers trying to make good decisions about who they work with, knowing that these creators are reaching audiences in the right country,” Adam explains. “Sometimes games aren’t available in every part of the world. Therefore, someone with an audience in a certain location may not even be able to play the game. And obviously that’s true, you’re going to be spending marketing dollars that are definitely not going to convert into sales because they literally can’t.”