How Much Do Game Studios Spend on Influencer Marketing? 2025 Budgets by Studio Size

Game studios spend about 1.3% of their game revenue on influencer marketing. In 2025 that came to an average of roughly $40 million a year at publishers with more than $1 billion in game revenue, $2.6 million at $100 million–1 billion studios and about $260,000 at $10–100 million studios — global, excluding mainland China.

The bigger driver is not size but business model. Mobile free-to-play studios put about 1% of revenue into creators; PC and console studios about 1.75%. If you are setting a budget, that distinction matters more than which revenue band you sit in.

This is the third piece from the same research. How Big Is the Gaming Influencer Marketing Market? sized the whole market at $2.8 billion, and Where Gaming Influencer Money Actually Goes split it by platform. This one divides it by company, so a studio can see what its peers spend. Same scope throughout: creator fees for sponsored integrations plus agency and platform commissions, excluding paid amplification, esports sponsorships and influencer software, and excluding mainland China's domestic market.

How Much Game Studios Spend on Influencer Marketing, by Studio Size

Zorka.Agency company census, latest reported fiscal year (mostly 2024–2025) normalised to 2025; global excluding mainland China's domestic market. Influencer spend = creator fees for sponsored integrations plus agency and platform commissions; excludes paid amplification. Base case — ranges in the method section below.

Three things are worth reading off that table.

The money is concentrated at the top. 37 companies account for 61% of all gaming influencer spend, and the 237 companies above $100 million in revenue for 82%. The 14,100 studios below $10 million share under 8% between them.

The percentage barely moves with size. Every tier lands between 1.16% and 1.40%. What separates them is the mix of mobile and PC/console revenue inside each tier, not how big the companies are — the largest tier spends the highest share because it holds the most PC and console revenue.

Averages are pulled up by the biggest names. A typical company in each tier spends somewhat less than the average shown, because a few large companies in every tier lift the mean above the median.

What Percentage of Revenue Do Game Studios Spend on Influencer Marketing?

About 1.3% overall, built from two numbers: how much of its revenue a studio spends on advertising, and how much of that advertising goes to creators. The first is measured in public filings. The second is not measured anywhere, and that is where the uncertainty sits.

Advertising ratios: FY2025 annual reports and SEC filings — revenue-weighted across five listed mobile free-to-play companies for mobile; for PC and console, the median sales-and-marketing ratio of EA, Ubisoft, CD PROJEKT and Capcom times the median share of it spent on advertising. Creator shares: Zorka.Agency estimates, explained below.

Mobile studios spend two and a half times more of their revenue on advertising, and still less of it on creators. Mobile user acquisition runs mostly through performance ad networks — AppsFlyer puts global mobile gaming UA spend at $25 billion in 2025 — and creators are estimated at a single-digit share of it. PC and console publishers spend less on advertising overall and put a much larger part of it into streamers and YouTubers, which is why Twitch money comes almost entirely from them.

Company size predicts surprisingly little. Among the largest listed publishers, marketing intensity ranges more than six-fold:

Form 10-K filings (Playtika, Take-Two, Electronic Arts, Roblox); Ubisoft FY2025 earnings release; CD PROJEKT consolidated financial statements 2025; Capcom annual securities report (FY ended March 2025).

The spread inside the billion-dollar tier, from Roblox at 5% to Playtika at 34.5%, is wider than the whole difference between large and small studios. Benchmark yourself against companies with your business model, not your revenue.

How Much Should Your Studio Budget for Influencer Marketing?

Start from revenue and business model, then decide where in the range you sit.

Base-case rates from the table above, applied to annual game revenue. A peer benchmark, not a target.

Move toward the top of the range in a launch year, for a new IP that nobody has heard of yet, or for a PC or console release where Twitch carries the launch window — in 2025 PC and console launches, Twitch took 45–100% of influencer budgets (Streamforge estimates). Move toward the bottom for a mature live game with a strong organic community, or a mobile title whose growth runs on paid UA and creators play a supporting role.

A benchmark tells you whether your number is in the normal range. It does not tell you whether that number will pay back. For that, build the forecast from your own conversion chain — our guide to forecasting an influencer budget and proving ROI walks through it, and the ROAS calculator runs the arithmetic.

From an Annual Budget to a First Campaign

An annual figure only becomes useful once it is translated into campaigns.

Above $1 million a year — the typical budget for a studio with more than $100 million in revenue — a studio can run always-on creator programmes and still fund launch bursts around releases and major updates. At this level the questions are about structure: how much runs evergreen, how much is held back for moments, and how the two are measured.

Between roughly $100,000 and $1 million a year — typical of the $10–100 million tier — the budget covers a structured test followed by a few scaled flights. This is where most of the money is lost or won, because there is enough to buy reach but not enough to buy it twice. A managed creator campaign at our own agency starts at $20,000, with larger programmes from $50,000 and $150,000; what a campaign costs lists what each level includes.

Below about $50,000 a year — the average for studios under $10 million — the budget sits under the entry point of a managed agency campaign, including ours. Direct deals with small and mid-sized creators in your genre, a free-key and early-access programme, and creator revenue share are the workable routes. Bring in an agency once annual creator spend reaches the six figures.

How This Benchmark Was Calculated

The company count. Each company is counted once at group level, so a subsidiary studio sits inside its parent. The top tier is a named census of 37 publishers — 30 verified from annual reports and 10-K or 20-F filings, seven estimated. The second tier combines 129 named companies with a modelled remainder. The three smaller tiers come from a power-law model fitted to published counts: Sensor Tower reports 11 mobile games above $1 billion, 144 above $100 million and 858 above $10 million in 2024, with PC counts from GameDiscoverCo (Gamalytic data), Alinea Analytics and VG Insights. The total is reconciled to Newzoo's 2024 games market less mainland China's domestic market. Tier revenues come from each company's latest reported fiscal year, mostly 2024–2025.

The rates. Advertising as a share of revenue comes from FY2025 filings: 24.5% for mobile free-to-play, weighted by revenue across Playtika, Playstudios, DoubleDown, Huuuge and Ten Square Games (Playtika is most of that weight), and 9.7% for PC and console. Each tier's rate is the mix of the two, weighted by how much of that tier's revenue is mobile.

What would move it. The creator share of advertising — 4% for mobile, 18% for PC and console — has no direct public measurement. The industry publishes adoption figures instead: 39% of studios use streamers for acquisition (GDC State of the Game Industry 2026), and organic influencer marketing ranks as the most effective channel in the Bastion video games marketing survey (2025). The mobile figure leans partly on Zorka.Agency's own published tracking of creator spend by top US mobile publishers, which makes it circular for this exercise; the PC and console figure is bounded by agency budget guides recommending 25–30% as the upper end. That is why the rates above carry ranges several times wider than anything else in the calculation. Two smaller caveats: about two-thirds of the second tier's revenue rests on analyst estimates rather than filings, and the counts of the two smallest tiers are uncertain by ±40% or more.

How it relates to the market estimate. This census totals $2.42 billion, inside the $1.5–4.7 billion corridor of our $2.8 billion market estimate, which combines it with a top-down method. It is $30 million lower than the census figure quoted there because each tier's mobile/PC mix is now taken from the census itself rather than assumed — a 1% difference that leaves every conclusion unchanged.

FAQ

What percentage of revenue do game studios spend on influencer marketing?

About 1.3% of game revenue on average — 1.32% across 15,267 game companies outside mainland China in our 2025 census. The business model moves it more than company size does: mobile free-to-play studios spend about 1.0% of revenue on creators, PC and console studios about 1.75%. The plausible range is wide, roughly 0.3–1.7% for mobile and 0.7–2.9% for PC and console, because no public source measures the creator share of game marketing directly.

How big are influencer marketing budgets at game studios?

In 2025 the average annual influencer marketing budget was about $40 million at publishers with more than $1 billion in game revenue, $2.6 million at $100 million–1 billion studios, $260,000 at $10–100 million studios, $28,000 at $1–10 million studios and under $5,000 below that. Those figures cover creator fees plus agency and platform commissions and exclude paid amplification (Zorka.Agency company census, global excluding mainland China).

Do PC and console studios spend more on influencers than mobile studios?

Yes, as a share of revenue — about 1.75% for PC and console against roughly 1.0% for mobile free-to-play. Mobile studios spend far more on advertising overall, around 24.5% of revenue in FY2025 filings against 9.7% for PC and console, but most of that goes to performance ad networks. PC and console publishers put a much larger share of a smaller ad budget into creators, mostly on Twitch and YouTube.

How are indie studios with limited budgets approaching influencer marketing?

Mostly without agencies, because the money is not there for a managed programme. The average studio with $1–10 million in game revenue spends about $28,000 a year on influencers, and one with $100,000–1 million under $5,000. At that level the workable route is direct deals with small and mid-sized creators in the game's own genre, paid in product access, revenue share or modest flat fees, with an agency only once annual creator spend reaches the six figures.

Where This Came From

This benchmark was produced as internal research at Zorka.Agency to size the market we work in, and published so that a studio defending a budget has a sourced number to point at instead of a guess. No client's spend appears in it.

If your number lands in the six figures or above, that is the range where working with a gaming influencer marketing agency starts to pay for itself — sourcing, contracting and measuring creators across markets is the part of the budget a studio usually under-resources. For campaign-level numbers, CPM by country and click-through by creator category, see our gaming influencer benchmarks.