Live ops influencer marketing starts where most creator plans stop: the week after launch. A live game ships seasons, updates, events and crossovers for years, and every one of them needs creators to play it in front of lapsed players and people who have never tried it. We call that creator marketing, and for live games it’s most of what we do.
Why creators drift away after launch
Creators play what’s new and what their viewers want. After a launch, a game drops out of the conversation unless something brings it back. Some creators move on for good. Others would come back if they had a reason and someone asked them at the right time.
The good news is that creators who liked the game often keep going on their own. After the Dying Light 2 Twitch Boost campaign, more than 50% of the Twitch creators who took part kept playing and streaming the game after launch. Read how Dying Light 2 reached #1 on Twitch. Live ops is about growing that group and bringing back the ones who drift.
Most games start from a smaller group. In 2026 campaigns we followed for 30 days after the paid streams ended, 18% of the sponsored streamers came back to the game on their own. Repeat deals also wear off a little: the second time a streamer was sponsored for the same game, the audience was a median 6% smaller than the first time. Fresh beats, a new season, a new mode or a reward for viewers, give creators and their chats something new to tune in for.
Source: Wehype campaign data, sponsored Twitch streams from 2024 to 2026 and Twitch viewing data for the 30 days after 2026 campaigns, pulled November 4, 2026.
Planning creators around seasons and updates
Each beat on your calendar is a reason for a creator to play again. We plan creator campaigns around the beats that change the game for players, and test formats on smaller beats before scaling the ones that work.
For Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, we split the campaign into three phases: launch, the Nuketown update and Season 1. Each update gave creators something new to show, so the campaign had several peaks instead of one. See the Black Ops 6 story.
For Brawl Stars, Supercell had revamped the ranked mode and wanted competitive players back. Seven German speaking creators promoted unique codes, and their bonuses were tied to how their community performed: how many players entered the code, reached 1,000+ trophies and hit Gold or Diamond rank. Viewer minutes on Twitch landed 97%+ over target. Read the Brawl Stars story.
For Star Wars: Hunters, Zynga brought us back for a second season after launch, with returning creators carrying the story forward. See the Star Wars: Hunters campaign.
Dying Light 2: Years of beats with one game
Our longest live ops partnership is with Techland. Since the Dying Light 2 launch, we’ve run creators for the Dying 2 Know YouTube series, a vampire crossover, the 2nd anniversary, a For Honor crossover and Winter Tales, in English, French, German, Spanish and Polish.
Each campaign mixed returning creators with new ones. Some discovered the game live with their community. Others came back and talked about how much it had changed. Across the partnership that adds up to 2,494 creator collaborations across Twitch and YouTube, 185M+ viewer minutes on Twitch and 105M+ YouTube views, with creators often streaming longer than required. Read the long Dying Light 2 story.
Live ops influencer marketing for big updates
Sometimes an update deserves a moment of its own. Supercell released Town Hall 16 in Clash of Clans earlier than anyone expected, in December 2023, and asked us to build the hype around it.
We came up with Clash for Nature. Players picked Team Trees or Team Seas, and the gold they looted in multiplayer battles counted toward a shared tracker that gave players new rewards and raised donation tiers for both causes. Creators like Jynxzi, Asmongold and PewDiePie were each assigned to a team, and a leaderboard ranked how much each creator’s community contributed. The $100,000 donation goal was reached, and the campaign delivered 72M+ viewer minutes on Twitch and 40M+ views on YouTube. Read the Clash for Nature story.
The mechanism matters more than the size. Players had a reason to play during the event, creators had a rivalry to talk about, and both were tied to what was new in the update.
Community Rewards: A reason to keep streaming
Paid campaigns cover the big beats. Between them, you need creators on the game without negotiating each stream. That’s what Community Rewards is for.
When a creator hits a streaming milestone on your game, their viewers earn in game rewards. Creators get something to give their community, and the game gets watch time between campaigns. We track your creator community on Twitch in real time and spot when someone picks up your game, so you can invite them straight away. The same tracking flags creators as new, active, at risk or churning, so you can reach the ones about to drift before they leave. In 2025 we handed out 23,000+ community rewards.
Creator Codes for live games
Creator Codes, our Support-A-Creator program, give creators a share of what their community spends in your game. A live game always has something new to buy, so a creator has a reason to bring the game back with every season. Our API plugs into your backend or store with a Wehype engineer alongside, creators get their code straight from the platform, and you set who can join and manage tiers from one portal. Our creator programs page covers how to build a program around it.
Gaming community marketing with real data
Gaming community marketing works when you know who is actually in your community. Community Insights shows how creators engage with your game over time, filtered by region, platform, game version or lifecycle stage. Pair it with Community Rewards or Creator Codes and you can act on what you see: boost a creator who is growing, or bring back one who stopped.
For seasonal pushes, Twitch Integration puts your offer inside the Twitch Sponsorship Dashboard, so the long tail of creators who played your game before can opt in again for the new season.
What a live ops plan needs from you
Share your calendar for the next few months: seasons, updates, events, crossovers and sales. We’ll suggest which beats need a paid push, which can run on Community Rewards and Creator Codes, and how to measure each one. We handle the boring stuff, creators get paid in 3 banking days, and we’ve launched campaigns in as little as 2 days.
Launching first? Start with game launches. Running a mobile game? See mobile games. For the platform behind all of this, read about our creator marketing platform, or go back to the gaming influencer marketing overview.
