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Ninja Might Have Received $1 Million to Promote Apex Legends

9/24/2023

What is one of the best ways to promote your business? Enlist the help of a famous person. Celebrity endorsements go back decades. Remember the cereal, Wheaties? They are famous for using celebrities to promote their product. Online games are starting to use the same formula to promote their new releases. There is a slight difference, though. They are using a modern form of celebrity. Professional gamers, and/or gamers who have a large online following, are the newest endorsers for online gaming. 

 

Who is Ninja? 

 

Ninja, given name Tyler Blevins, is the world’s most heavily followed online computer gamer. He is famous for his epic hair color changes, and top tier gaming skills. Ninja, in his late 20’s, is followed by more than 13 million people on Twitch. 

 

The iconic online personality started his career in 2009 by professionally playing Halo 3. After playing for several online organizations, he became a streamer in 2011. Blevins continued to build his career by playing Fortnite: Battle Royale. His popularity grew in tandem with the popularity of the game. In less than a year, his following grew from 500,000 to more than 2 million. 

 

Throughout his career, Ninja has won numerous online gaming awards. For example, in both 2018 and 2019, he won the Live Gamer category at the Streamy Awards. In 2019 Ninja also won the Twitch Streamer of the Year category at the Shorty Awards. Though Ninja did not win, he was nominated for the 2020 Favorite Gamer at the Kids Choice Awards. 

 

Evidently, Ninja is a well-liked and influential personality in the online gaming world. It is no wonder that Electronic Arts enlisted his help to promote their new, free-to-play Apex Legends. 

Did He Receive $1 Million to Promote Apex Legends?

Reportedly, Electronic Arts did, in fact, pay Ninja $1 million dollars to promote its new game Apex Legends. He was one of several professional gamers to be asked to take part in the big launch day for the game. 

 

EA competes with other online games such as Fortnite. Since Fortnite is wildly popular, EA needed to come up with a way to differentiate themselves and create hype around Apex Legends. It seems as though this marketing strategy paid off big time. In less than 30 days, Apex Legends garnered over 50 million players. 10 million of those players signed up within the first three days. 

 

With the backing of Ninja, Apex Legends was almost guaranteed to do well. No professional worth their salt would endorse a game that is destined to fail. 

 

 Final Remarks 

 

Interestingly, Ninja’s payday was seen as big news. It is likely due to the fact that he gained most of his followers by playing Fortnite, which is created by Electronic Arts’ competitor Epic Games. Online gaming is an extremely competitive world where each game maker must find a way to make themselves bigger and better than their competition. Enlisting the help of a loved computer gamer is one-way Electronic Arts showed how it is changing the game.