For a decade now, LA-based talent management company Loaded Holdings has been building up its video games business.
First came Open World, a consultancy aimed at helping marketers unfamiliar with the industry. That division then launched NoScope, an analytics and discovery platform for the streaming giant Twitch. Now, Open World is rolling out a new product called Hitscan, which builds on NoScope.
According to Open World’s SVP of creator programs, Adam Dempsky, this is a platform that lets game publishers “gain insight on creators that are making content about their game”. He adds that the company is looking to provide more than the usual level of analytics and data available to developers and publishers about what creators are up to on services like Twitch.
“It can be used for creator discovery; it can be used to understand who the right creators are that you might want to work with,” Dempsky explains. “We were looking at it mostly through the lens of creator programs and earned initiatives, because there is a big component of Hitscan that tries to help understand the relationship history – how, when and in what capacity you have worked with creators in the past.”
Part of the selling point of Hitscan, as far as Open World is concerned, is the visibility it gives people at a company over their partnerships with creators, as well as how their games are being covered and by which creators.
“A lot of the time, what we’ve seen is whether it’s an indie that has a one-person marketing team, all the way to AAA publishers that might have five or more people dedicated to just creator marketing, they’re in the weeds with this day in, day out,” Dempsky explains. “It’s the only thing that they care about. We wanted the whole organisation to have that full visibility. We often see creator, brand, and product teams working in different silos. Common knowledge sharing and a single source of truth don’t really exist.
“The platform helps in terms of roster management; it helps understand the data behind your IP, what creators are driving the most impact and viewership, engagement around your game, and how those creators are trending over time. You’ll be able to see when a creator joined your creator program and see the incremental value-add impact that they have driven for your game since you launched your creator program.
“We also wanted to build this to help people who might not have the largest resource bandwidth, introducing features like alerts that help you understand when creators have moved from being active contributors in your program to someone who has gone dormant for the last 30 days. This could alert you to re-engage with them. We want to be able to help contextualise that information for the creators that you work with.”
Data game
For this to work, Open World collates data on creators, which can be sorted by geography or how closely a company works with an influencer, for example.
“We are pulling in information about creators that publishers care about. A publisher could come to us and say they have worked with these 300 creators over time,” Dempsky says.
“You’re able to contextualise that data within the specific scope of your game. You will always be able to see where your game ranks for creators as well as other data around content that they are developing for your game.”
Dempsky is keen to emphasise that the directories of creators Hitscan maintains for its clients aren’t just “here is the top 500 creators on Twitch.”
“It’s about tailoring the experience to a specific publisher and how we can design a workspace experience for an EA versus a Devolver versus a Skybound versus an indie publisher that maybe has five games in the portfolio,” he says. “We are looking at building it around what matters most to each publisher and to their games. That’s ultimately how we see the vast majority of publishers in the space as well as users of our Hitscan tool, utilising the functionality that we have.”
So far, publishers including Devolver Digital and Skybound have been using Hitscan. A spokesperson from the former tells GamesIndustry.biz that the tech “provides a unique opportunity to collaborate directly to prioritise our needs and approach to creator discovery.” In particular, Devolver says the platform has been useful for “monitoring back catalogue coverage”, as it lets the label “see who is revisiting previous titles immediately” and is “super helpful in keeping an eye on both big picture and more concentrated coverage.”
Dempsky says that Hitscan is keeping an eye on creators that are “moving the needle” for a particular game – but what does this mean? What signals is the platform tracking to know which creators are making a difference?
“It starts with understanding who the right creators are to really drive impact for your game”
“A lot of times we are looking at viewership impact; we are looking at engagement of content that creators are developing,” he explains. “We look at a few different buckets. I feel like discovery is a huge element of that. We are looking at the engagement with the content creators are developing.
“Discovery is a huge element of that. It starts with understanding who the right creators are to really drive impact for your game, or who it’d be great to open up relationships with. A lot of what we are doing on the discovery side is layering in context around audience and viewership fit. Looking at backlogs of content that creators have made for different games, competitive games, similar type games and understanding how it is that what creators have done in the past can help provide those signals for an IP that hasn’t launched yet or a franchise that is brand new to the market.”
Short-form video
When it comes to the most valuable content creation platforms for developers and publishers, the story is much the same as it has been for the last decade. Twitch and YouTube are still the biggest players, but short-form platforms are a growing presence in the space.
“YouTube was the pioneer in the space, and is still the second biggest search engine on the internet behind Google,” says Dempsky. “Twitch came in and built a lot of momentum; it still has the niche of being the absolute leader in livestreaming, so those live moments. It’s like live sports; those moments that can’t be replicated.
“But obviously, there’s been the rise of TikTok, which has been something that we are very keen on in terms of functionality for Hitscan as well. What we are seeing is creators that might be starting with their livestream, and they might be on for a three-, four-, five-hour-long livestream, but then they chop down those clips and post them to their YouTube channel, then they chop those clips even more and put them on TikTok as 30-second clips.
“Creators that might be starting with their livestream… but then they chop down those clips”
“A lot of times they are seeing that as a way to reach a different type of audience; you want to be able to hit that audience that is there with you day in, day out, they’re there 2pm every day when you start livestreaming. But also being able to optimise for the algorithms that are out there right now.”
Looking to the future, Dempsky wants to position Hitscan as “the single source of truth” for working with creators.
“When you have a new game coming out, you need to understand who the creators you should keep an eye on are, who would be good to work with,” he says, pitching Hitscan as a tool to “develop not just a-moment-in-time visibility into performance metrics and the impact that is driven by creators, but also being that forward looking and suggested tool that shows where you’re at now [and also] your opportunities are for your program,” he says. The latter is aligned with Loaded’s recent acquisition of influencer marketing outfit Drope.me, which was built to involve creators in performance marketing.
“What that acquisition signalled was that the way we want to tie in not just the intelligence layer that we have been building with Hitscan, but tying it into the functionality that Drope built, which is this activation layer,” Dempsky continues. “Understanding that you have a creator program, it’s live, you’ve got Hitscan tracking it, running the intelligence against it. But what are you going to do at the program level? What are you doing with creators? How are you keeping them engaged and sustained in your game over time?”
Dempsky sees big potential for AI to interrogate the data and deliver more useful insights. “You might say that you have a roster of 200 creator partners; Hitscan might be able to provide you with a list of creators that are similar to the ones that are in your VIP bucket,” he explains. The goal is “not just having it act as a platform that has a boatload of information that you have to sift through and parse through, but it’s actually making you smarter as a creator program manager, as someone who is keeping an eye on creator activity around your game.”
He concludes: “We wanted to build and emphasise that dynamic creator understanding, and we want Hitscan to be the single destination. You shouldn’t have a tool for tracking Twitch metrics, another for paid media boosting and one more for understanding competitors’ titles. We want this to be the single source, the single destination, and have it be something that can work and really prove of huge business value for indie labels all the way up to AAA publishers.”
