How Big Is the Gaming Influencer Marketing Market?

The gaming influencer marketing market is worth roughly $2.8 billion in 2025, within a corridor of $1.5–4.7 billion — global, excluding mainland China. About $1.6 billion of it flows through agencies. PC and console take 64% of the spend against mobile's 36%, despite the two generating almost identical game revenue.

That estimate comes from four independent calculations run against each other rather than one model with a confident output. Where they converge, the number is trustworthy. Where they diverge, we say so — and one input in particular could move the whole answer by a multiple, so it gets its own section below rather than a footnote.

Scope, because a market figure without its definition is not comparable to anything: this counts creator fees plus agency and platform commissions, excludes paid amplification of creator content, covers calendar 2025, and excludes mainland China's domestic market — the audience there is served by a separate creator economy that Western agencies do not reach.

How We Arrived at $2.8 Billion

Four methods, built from different source data so that agreement between them means something.

Global excluding mainland China, calendar 2025. Creator fees plus agency and platform commissions; paid amplification excluded.

The two high-quality methods are the ones to weigh. Top-down from game revenue and the bottom-up census share no inputs — one starts from platform-level revenue and advertising ratios, the other from a named census of companies — and they land 18% apart, at $2.08 billion and $2.45 billion. Two unrelated routes arriving that close is the strongest evidence in this exercise.

The second top-down method runs consistently higher, at $3.6 billion base. That is expected rather than alarming: it starts from total influencer spend and takes gaming's share of it, which captures non-gaming brands buying gaming creators — energy drinks, hardware, telecoms sponsoring streamers. Those dollars reach gaming audiences but do not market a game.

The supply-side method is reported and excluded. Estimating creator population and integration frequency from public data produced a range too wide to inform anything, $0.3–3.8 billion. Including it would have widened the final corridor without adding information.

The underlying inputs, all from published sources: global game revenue of $201.6 billion in 2025 (Newzoo Global Games Market Report 2026), less mainland China's $49.5 billion (CGIGC), leaving $152 billion — $77 billion mobile, $44 billion console, $32 billion PC. Advertising as a share of game revenue comes from audited SEC filings for FY2025: 24.5% weighted for mobile publishers, 9.7% for PC and console. Global influencer spend outside China of $26–33 billion derives from Statista's worldwide figure of $44.18 billion less China's 52–58% share (Statista, Ebiquity).

Why PC and Console Take 64% of Gaming Influencer Spend

This is the finding that contradicts how the industry talks about itself.

Base-case parameters, 2025. Advertising ratios from audited FY2025 filings; influencer share is an assumption — see below.

Mobile and PC/console generate almost the same game revenue outside China. Mobile publishers then spend two and a half times more of that revenue on advertising — 24.5% against 9.7% — which is exactly what you would expect from a business built on paid user acquisition.

And yet mobile ends up the smaller half of influencer spend, because the share of the advertising budget that reaches creators differs by more than four times: around 4% on mobile against around 18% on PC and console. Mobile UA money goes overwhelmingly into performance channels that clear an auction and report an install. PC and console launches have no equivalent install-attribution loop, and creators — particularly on Twitch — function as the primary launch channel rather than one line in a media plan.

The practical read for a marketer: if you work on a PC or console title, you are competing for creator inventory against most of your industry's marketing budget. If you work on mobile, creators are still an underweighted channel relative to how much your peers spend on advertising overall.

How Much of the Market Reaches Agencies

Not all of it, and the gap matters if you are sizing this as a business rather than as an industry.

Between 45% and 70% of influencer spend is mediated by agencies rather than bought direct, centring on 58% (ANA, Linqia). Applied to the $2.8 billion base case, that is roughly $1.6 billion in gross billings. Agencies keep a commission of 15–30% of what passes through them (InfluencerFee, Favikon, ChelleLaw), which puts the net revenue pool at about $370 million in the base case — the full range spans $0.1–1.0 billion, because both the mediated share and the commission rate are uncertain and they compound.

The remainder is bought directly: studios with in-house creator teams, and talent representatives selling straight to publishers.

What Would Move This Estimate

One parameter dominates everything above, and it is the weakest link in the chain: the share of a game company's marketing budget that goes to creators — the 4% and 18% in the platform table.

No public source measures it. The industry publishes adoption metrics freely — 86% of marketers use influencer marketing, 39% of game studios work with streamers per GDC — but not budget share. Our figures were derived from usage data and normative guides, and the mobile anchor draws partly on Zorka.Agency's own campaign reporting, which makes it circular for this exercise. We are stating that plainly because the alternative is presenting a proprietary anchor as an independent observation.

This is why the answer is published as a corridor rather than a point. Move the PC/console parameter from 18% to 12% and the total drops toward the conservative bound; move it to 25% and it approaches the optimistic one. Every other input — game revenue, advertising ratios, China's share — is sourced from audited filings or established trackers and moves the result by percentage points, not multiples.

Two other honest caveats. Gaming's share of the influencer market is only partially confirmed: Influencer Marketing Hub reports gaming as the second-largest vertical at 11.9% of brands running campaigns, which supports the order of magnitude but measures brands, not dollars. And in the bottom-up census, roughly 65% of the second revenue tier rests on analyst estimates rather than primary filings, with ad-monetised publishers the most exposed.

How This Compares With Published Figures

Two third-party estimates exist, and our number sits between them.

The spread between the two published figures is 2.2 times, and neither states its definition in enough detail to reconcile them — which is the real lesson here. Before quoting any market size, including this one, check three things: whether paid amplification is inside the number, whether mainland China is inside the scope, and which year the underlying data is from. Most disagreements in this category dissolve into definitions.

FAQ

How big is the gaming influencer marketing market?

Roughly $2.8 billion in 2025, within a corridor of $1.5–4.7 billion — global, excluding mainland China. That figure covers creator fees plus agency and platform commissions, and excludes paid amplification of creator content. Two published third-party estimates bracket it: Mordor Intelligence puts gaming influencer marketing services at $2.09 billion, and Influencer Marketing Hub at $4.6 billion.

Is gaming influencer marketing bigger on mobile or on PC and console?

PC and console, by a wide margin. They account for about 64% of gaming influencer spend ($1.33 billion) against 36% for mobile ($0.76 billion), even though the two halves generate roughly the same game revenue outside China — $76 billion and $77 billion respectively. Mobile studios spend far more on advertising overall, but they put a much smaller share of it into creators.

How much of gaming influencer marketing spend goes through agencies?

Between 45% and 70% of it, centring on about 58% — roughly $1.6 billion in gross billings in 2025. After commission of 15–30%, the net revenue pool available to agencies is around $370 million. The rest is bought directly by studios from creators and their talent representatives.

What percentage of the influencer marketing market is gaming?

Around 10–13% of global influencer marketing spend outside mainland China, which totals $26–33 billion. Influencer Marketing Hub reports gaming as the second-largest vertical by the share of brands running campaigns at 11.9%, which independently supports that order of magnitude. No direct dollar measurement of gaming's share of influencer spend exists in open sources.

Why do published estimates of the gaming influencer market differ so much?

Because they measure different things. Some count only creator fees, others add agency commissions, others add paid amplification of creator content — which can double the total on its own. Scope differs too: including mainland China adds roughly half of global influencer spend. Any figure quoted without its definition and its year cannot be compared with another.

Where This Came From

This estimate was produced as internal research at Zorka.Agency to size the market we operate in, then published because the alternative — every discussion of this category citing a paywalled figure of unstated scope — serves nobody. The model was calibrated against first-party campaign data from 25 gaming clients; those figures are not disclosed here, and no client's spend appears in this analysis.

If you want the campaign-level numbers underneath a media plan rather than the market above it, our gaming influencer benchmarks publish CPM by country, click-through by creator category and revenue per download from campaigns we ran. For who does this work, see our rankings of gaming influencer marketing agencies and mobile game UA agencies, and our case studies for what the work looks like in practice.