EA Gave Ninja $1 Million Just To Play And Tweet About Apex Legends

TheGamer

By Lou Flavius

Published Mar 15, 2019

EA paid popular streamer Tyler Blevins, more commonly known as "Ninja," 1 million to play Apex Legends for a few hours and to tweet about it.

via variety.com

It has recently been revealed that EA paid popular streamer Tyler Blevins, more commonly known as "Ninja," 1 million to play Apex Legends.

The videogame industry has worked very hard to prove that parents suck at predicting the future. Not very long ago, kids were being told to lay off the games and focus on their studies, as gaming wouldn't get them anywhere. However, it's certainly beginning to seem that the above was the worst advice a mother or father could possibly give to a kid because, apparently, some people are out here making millions just to play games and post about them on social media.

Well, at least one guy has been this lucky. However, gamers all over the world are making some serious money from the comfort of their homes and in gaming tournaments.

According to a story from Reuters, which cites an unnamed source, EA paid Ninja 1 million to play Apex Legends for a few hours and to tweet about it.

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It certainly helps that Ninja is the most followed PC gamer in the world. He seemed to have given EA and Respawn quite the boost, as they hit 10 million players in three days and 50 million in the game's first month.

When the free-to-play battle royale released on February 4, Ninja tweeted about the game the following day and streamed his gameplay to his excess of 13 million followers on Twitch.

EA's representatives have declined to comment on how much Ninja was paid, as have his own reps. However, the Reuters source claims that the 27-year-old influencer made more than twice what prior reports said he raked in.

“They did a fairly comprehensive job at pulling together all of the relevant game influencers in this genre,” Kevin Knocke, a vice president at esports infrastructure firm ReKTGlobal, explains.

“This was a really well-coordinated poaching of the top influencers the likes of which has not been seen so far in esports."

EA also paid renowned streamer "Shroud" to do the same as Ninja but have declined to disclose the details regarding that deal as well.

Drew McCoy, the lead producer at the EA studio that created Apex Legends has admitted that the publishers put in some real effort to get the game noticed worldwide.

“We really wanted to create a day where you couldn’t escape Apex if you cared about games and we wanted it to feel like an event was happening everywhere around the globe on that day,” he said.

“We had streamers from all over Europe, LatAm, North America, Korea, Japan so that we could get our message out there and people would see the game."

Of course, that million paid to Ninja is a drop in the bucket for EA. They'll certainly be making hundreds of millions, given the game's success.

However, let this be a lesson to kids out there: don't forget about school, but you also don't have to be a doctor, lawyer, or astronaut to make that paper; just look at Ninja.