When a live service game goes quiet between content drops, most creators quietly drift to whatever just launched, that's just how the algorithm-chasing works. Apex Legends lost over 220,000 concurrent players across three straight seasons, Season 21 through Season 23. That's not a dip, that's a sustained nine-month decline, the kind that makes a live service team genuinely nervous, because it rarely reverses. Respawn Entertainment needed a partner who could fill the dead time between content updates, not just spike around launches the way most gaming influencer marketing campaigns do.
The approach
We came in with one core idea: stop treating creators as a marketing channel and start treating them as a user group with their own needs, the same way you'd think about any community you actually want to keep. That meant consistent viewership rewards and community engagement across the full season, not one burst tied to a patch release and then silence. It meant letting incentives shift week to week based on what was actually working, refreshing dares to help creators find what worked for others instead of running the same playbook for twelve weeks straight. And it meant giving creators' own streaming schedules real room to shift toward Apex, rather than forcing one sponsored stream into a calendar that snaps right back to normal the next day.
Season 24 results
The community responded, and responded hard. Participating creators roughly doubled their Apex stream share, from 13.5% to 26.5% of their total streaming time - also nearly doubling their Apex stream time overall. Forty-six creators who had gone fully dormant on Apex came back to the ecosystem. Over the course of the season, those creators grew their total Apex streaming time by an average of roughly 28 hours per creator, against a matched control group that actually declined by about half an hour over the same season. That gap held up under statistical testing across 126 creators, compared within groups of similar audience size, with confidence intervals for the two groups that don't overlap at all. In plain terms: participating creators streamed 2x more Apex than the comparison group.
Season 25 confirmed it
The same pattern held a second consecutive season: roughly plus 9.9 hours per creator over the course of Season 25, versus about minus 0.6 hours for the control group, with the same non-overlapping confidence intervals. Two consecutive seasons, same result, same control methodology. Again, participating creators streamed 2x more Apex than the comparison group - with such statistical significance that if it were a drug, the FDA would approve it.
What it meant for the game
For the first time in nine months, Apex Legends' concurrent player numbers stopped declining during Season 24. Andy Lunique, Respawn's Director of Global Influencer Marketing and Programs, put it directly: "In conjunction with Dare Drop's work in Season 24, Apex Legends' player loss stopped for the first time in nearly a year." Worth being precise here, because precision matters more than a punchy headline: this is correlation, not proven causation, and we're not claiming sole credit for a platform-wide trend reversing. What the data does show clearly, and this is the part that matters, is the creator-side result. Treating creators as their own user group and a community worth consistently rewarding produced a massive and validated shift in the exact metric the game needed to move.
For the mechanics of running a Twitch-specific campaign like this one, including how dares and rewards structure engagement, see How to Launch a Twitch Influencer Marketing Campaign. For the broader argument on why paid and organic engagement should be measured together, this campaign is the clearest proof case we've got, see Paid vs. Organic Influencer Marketing for Games.
