After a difficult period in 2023, the esports industry bounced back in 2024.

Over the past year, esports league operators such as Blast and ESL/FACEIT Group developed closer ties with publishers, allowing them to scale up their business and become profitable; publishers stepped up their revenue share programs, helping some teams achieve stability; and, perhaps most importantly, brands and marketers upped their spending in the space, encouraged by the rise of international events such as the Esports World Cup.

If 2023 was esports winter — a time of austerity caused by brands pulling back on their marketing spend in the space — then 2024 marked the beginning of esports spring, or at least somewhat of a thaw. As advertisers once again opened their wallets for esports inventory, the entire industry breathed a collective sigh of relief. However, esports is not yet a standard category in advertising spend forecasts, and it’s unclear exactly what proportion of brands’ gaming marketing dollars went towards the competitive side of the space over the past year. For now, tales of the recovery of esports in 2024 remain largely anecdotal.

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As gaming takes a central role in the rise of transmedia content, a team of writers is using DC Comics superheroes to demonstrate the benefits of direct interplay between a TV series and a video game.

Last month, Digiday covered the launch of “DC Heroes United,” a cartoon series featuring classic DC characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The show, which kicked off on Nov. 20, allows fans to vote on the outcomes of the narrative by playing a parallel mobile game, which is itself part of the framing narrative of the series. It’s the most direct connection between a television series and video game yet — and thanks to the show’s use of popular DC characters, hundreds of thousands of viewers have already tuned in across streaming platforms such as Tubi and YouTube.

So far, five of the series’ 16 planned episodes have come out. After the release of the first two episodes, Digiday spoke to the creative team behind the series to learn more about how they factored gamers’ decisions and preferences into the series’ narrative in real time. This is the transmedia story of “DC Heroes United.”

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Last month, Clip It, Roblox’s version of TikTok, launched its first official ad products. Now, Sia has become the first musician to activate inside Clip It — and it’s already sparked an unprecedented uptick of user activity within the experience.

Much like TikTok, Clip It is a short-form video service located entirely inside Roblox, with users able to create, share and scroll through videos of their in-game avatars dancing to music inside a variety of virtual settings. 

Sia’s Clip It integration, which launched on December 12 and runs through the end of 2024, gives users access to a free selection of holiday-themed songs, as well as a variety of settings, animations and virtual items based on Sia’s wardrobe and music videos. It’s the first time a prominent mainstream musical artist has placed their music and branding inside Clip It, although the experience also sells custom music and animation packs such as September’s Phonk Pack.

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Since the summer, Epic Games has invested in a marketing campaign promoting specific creator-made experiences inside Fortnite. So far, the effort has resulted in a serious traffic boost for the chosen experiences — but it’s also raised questions among some creators regarding how and why Epic decides to elevate certain games on the platform over others.

From at least June 2024 onward, Epic Games has selected specific creator-made Fortnite experiences developed by third-party studios — including “Lumberjack Heroes,” “Havoc Hotel” and “Mercenaries” — for a marketing campaign that has included trailers on the official PlayStation YouTube channel and paid promotions by TikTok creators and Twitch streamers, in addition to posts across Fortnite’s official social accounts on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. Following the campaign, the concurrent user counts of all three experiences ballooned by the thousands.

“Fortnite creators have the ability to submit their islands for consideration across a variety of promotional opportunities, including the Epic’s Picks Discover row and through our social media channels,” an Epic spokesperson said.

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After an ambitious, but abortive, effort to diversify its business in 2023, the esports team 100 Thieves refocused on brand partnerships in 2024 – and was rewarded by a significant rise in sponsor interest.

100 Thieves’ renewed focus on sponsorships has already paid off. After signing 11 new sponsors and achieving a 50 percent sponsorship renewal rate in 2023, the org managed to bring on 23 new sponsors in 2024, including brands such as Crocs, Adidas and Google Play, with a renewal rate of 75 percent over the past twelve months, according to numbers shared with Digiday by 100 Thieves. Company reps declined to specify the specific dollar value of its sponsorship deals, which typically involve the brand paying the team a fee in exchange for a set number of deliverables, such as social media posts, content pieces and jersey logo slaps, as well as more bespoke custom activations. 

In spite of many esports companies’ attempts to escape the pain of brands’ shrinking marketing budgets, 100 Thieves’ evolution over the past year shows how the industry at large remains dependent on advertising to stay afloat, for better or worse.

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In the world of video games, “Call of Duty” is still king. Earlier this year, the series experienced its biggest launch weekend ever following the Oct. 25 release of “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.”

The buzz around “Black Ops 6” showed how “Call of Duty” has successfully worked its way into mainstream popular culture. To back up the release, Activision ran a marketing campaign that injected the series’ popular “Replacer” character into a wide range of popular entertainment and sports properties, including Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, ESPN’s Sportscenter and Sky Sports. 

Activision’s marketing push for “Black Ops 6” appears to have paid off. Content featuring the “Replacer” character garnered 268 million impressions across platforms, according to data shared with Digiday by Activision. 

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As marketers grow wiser about the multitude of ways to reach gamers, gaming company Overwolf’s focus on owned-and-operated gaming properties has helped grow the company into one of the industry’s largest ad networks.

Founded in 2010 as a software platform for game developers, Overwolf has since evolved into a holding company whose portfolio includes a range of prominent gaming platforms, including the game modification platform CurseForge, in-game payment service Tebex and gaming ad tech company Nitro. Last year, Overwolf brought in nearly $50 million in ad sales, with brands and agencies such as Universal Pictures, Nissan, Dentsu and Havas buying into the company’s gaming inventory.

Overwolf has continued to grow over the past year. In August, Comscore released data indicating that Overwolf had become the fourth-most-visited gaming property in the United States, surpassing the platforms of competitors including Activision Blizzard and Epic Games. At the moment, Overwolf’s unique monthly user count is now above 100 million, more than doubling its audience year over year, according to data the company shared with Digiday.

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Twitch creator Kai Cenat just finished a month-long “subathon,” livestreaming nonstop for 30 days and smashing the platform’s subscriber record in the process. The event was a ringing endorsement of Twitch as a creator platform — but also showcased the challenges caused by its lack of original IP.

Cenat’s record-breaking stream tested the limits of Twitch’s brand safety guidelines. Although Twitch dissolved its Safety Advisory Council, an advisory group of industry experts, in May, the company has since taken steps to improve its brand safety tools for prospective advertisers. On Nov. 1, for example, Twitch added a new feature that allows users to hide streams that broadcast political or otherwise controversial content, creating new content labels in an effort to help brands exert more control over the types of content they advertise alongside.

But although Cenat’s stream was occasionally marked by PG-13 or R-rated behavior, Twitch did not take any public steps to shield its advertisers from his or his team’s more controversial content. The situation highlighted the divergent needs of some of Twitch’s largest streamers and the brands that advertise on the platform. Twitch needs to consider the needs of both its creators and its advertisers — but threading the needle between the two can be a delicate dance.

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