What is this and why am I doing it?
Welcome back to my ongoing deep dives into influencer marketing for major game launches. This week it’s AION 2, NCSOFT’s sequel to the original Aion, which launched worldwide on Steam and NC’s own PURPLE launcher on October 5, 2026, free to play, after five days of paid early access. Korea and Taiwan have been playing it since November 2025. So this was a second launch of a game that had been live for a year.
These analyses use Streamforge’s tech to give marketers transparent, actionable insights into how publishers are allocating influencer budgets. My goal remains consistent: help industry professionals benchmark their campaigns and uncover strategies that work.
I’m not affiliated with NCSOFT or NC America, and all budget figures are estimates based on publicly available data and market rates from Streamforge’s algorithm, adjusted for where each creator’s audience lives.
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A Chronological Overview
AION 2’s Western campaign started almost a year after the game launched in Asia. It was built on NC’s own broadcasts and showcases, a free test weekend and a creator league.
- May 29, 2025: First in-game footage on the first “AION2NIGHT” developer broadcast in Korea.
- September 11, 2025: Korea and Taiwan launch date revealed. Korean pre-registration opens.
- November 13 to 16, 2025: NC is main sponsor of G-Star in Busan for the first time.
- November 19, 2025: Korea and Taiwan launch on PC and mobile. A pay-to-win backlash over upgrade items in a Day One package follows. NC apologizes, and its stock closes down 14.61%.
- April 21, 2026: Global release announced, with servers in North America, South America, Europe and Japan. The Steam page goes live.
- June 5 to 8, 2026: New trailer at Summer Game Fest, and a hands-on for media and creators at SGF Play Days.
- July 22, 2026: Founder’s Packs go on sale at $24.99, $49.99 and $99.99, each with five days of early access from September 30. The same day, AION 2 shows up on stage at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked.
- August 10, 2026: Global monetization revealed: free to play, an optional $15 membership, a Battle Pass.
- August 25, 2026: gamescom Opening Night Live: a new trailer and the October 5 launch date, moved from September around GTA 6’s release.
- September 17 and 18, 2026: The Launch Scale Test, open to everyone on Steam and PURPLE with no keys or sign-up.
- September 23, 2026: The War For Atreia draft: six captains pick 60 creators into six teams, live on Twitch and YouTube.
- September 29, 2026: The AION 2 Creator Program opens, run through Lurkit.
- September 30, 2026: Early access for Founder’s Pack owners. Peak of 171,530 concurrent players on Steam, and #1 on Steam’s global Top Sellers.
- October 5, 2026: Free-to-play launch. Peak of 397,905 on Steam.
What stands out is how little of this was new. NC used Korea as a year-long public beta, then repeated the same steps in the West: a developer broadcast, a date reveal, a stress test, early access, launch. The one new piece was the creator side, and it came last, all inside the final two weeks.
Korea Was the Beta
The Korean launch is the context for everything NC did in the West. The Day One package that sold upgrade items, the apology, the 14.61% stock drop: Western MMO players watched all of it happen.
So NC promised the global version would have “less aggressive monetisation” than Throne and Liberty, and shipped it free to play with a $15 membership and cosmetics. That lasted about a week. By October 21, the Steam score had fallen from 76.2% positive in early access to 58.1% (“Mixed”), and Korean press blamed the membership: it’s per server, not per account, and you need it to trade.
Founder’s Packs and the Launch Scale Test
NC charged for early access and made the stress test free.
The Founder’s Packs went on sale ten weeks before early access. Every tier included the same five days, so the $24.99 pack got you the same access as the $99.99 one, which only added cosmetics. Steam wishlists passed 1.3 million before early access opened, and on September 30 AION 2 hit #1 on Steam’s global Top Sellers.
The Launch Scale Test two weeks earlier was free, with no keys and no registration. So anyone could stream it, and nobody needed a deal to get in.
Twitch Drops
NC ran Drops on every channel, the whole way through:
- Early access (September 30 to October 4): eight rewards, from 15 minutes to 8 hours of watching.
- Launch (October 5 to 16): seven rewards, from 1 hour to 10 hours.
- War For Atreia (October 2 to 14): rewards that only counted on the 60 War For Atreia channels.
Because Drops worked on every channel, any MMO streamer had a reason to play AION 2, and on launch day 4,025 channels did, second only to Fortnite.
War For Atreia
War For Atreia is the most original part of the campaign, and the part I’d copy.
NC picked 60 creators across North America, Europe and Latin America and split them into six “legions”, one per region and faction. Six captains (Stoopzz and Sonii for North America, Baggins and Wakayashi for Europe, Rakin and Tixinha for Latin America) drafted their teams live on September 23. From September 30 to October 14, the legions competed for points in the game and on Twitch. Stoopzz’s legion won by six points over Sonii’s.
The best part is the exclusive Drops. Three Drops campaigns only counted on those 60 channels, and each one unlocked when the creators hit a points target. So anyone who wanted the rewards had to watch one of the event creators.
NC never said it paid them, but the creators did. Moshi told his chat on day one: “We are being compensated for our time as well.” I count all 384 event streams from 53 creators: $256,461 at market rates, 17.5% of the budget.
The Creator Program
The day before early access, NC opened the AION 2 Creator Program through Lurkit, an outside creator platform, for creators from 500 followers up. It offered event access, Drops and promotion, but no published pay, and applications took about two weeks to review, so most of the launch window was over before anyone new got in.
The creators I could tie to the program are small: 14 creators and $4,327 of content at market rates. It opened too late to matter for launch, and it’s more useful for the months after.
How the Paid Deals Worked
NC bought most of its streams as two-hour blocks. As shroud told his chat: “my sponsor stream is two hours long.”
Most creators kept playing after the two hours were up. Jinnytty was supposed to play for two hours and played for seven. That’s the best result a sponsor can get from an MMO stream: you pay for two hours and the creator plays all night.
The most common package was two of those blocks, one in early access and one at launch. 43 of the 101 creators NC hired directly got exactly that. Some deals came together on the day: a few creators said on stream that the offer had come in that afternoon.
Echo: Buying a Whole Team
The biggest package in the campaign went to a team, not a single creator.
Echo is a World of Warcraft esports team, best known for racing to be the first guild to beat new raids. From October 5 to 7, ten of its players and the team’s own channel streamed AION 2 together, every title tagged #ad: 29 paid streams across 11 channels.
Echo ran the promotion itself, with its own bot and its own tracking links in each player’s chat. So Echo acted as the agency as well as the creators.
At market rates, Echo comes to $92,840, about 6.3% of the budget. But 61% of that is three streams on the team channel, priced from its 90-day average, and those streams averaged only 424 to 771 viewers. I’d be surprised if the real invoice came close to $93k.
If you want a squad stream, a team is an easy way to buy one: the players already play together, and the team handles the links. Just don’t price it off the team channel.
Japan
Japan got its own campaign, run by NC Japan, and it took about a tenth of the money.
NC paid 17 Japanese creators $138,291 at market rates, 9.4% of the budget, across 74 paid streams and videos. Almost all of it went to two of Japan’s biggest Twitch streamers:
- fps_shaka ($73,569): three paid streams after launch.
- stylishnoob4 ($51,678): 28, 26 and 17 hours on three straight days, 1.9M views.
Then there’s the 天魔配信祭 (a streaming festival), NC Japan’s hashtag event for small streamers and VTubers. It covered 62 paid streams and videos from 12 creators, worth $2,576 at market rates for the whole festival. That’s the opposite of the shaka deal: lots of small creators for almost nothing.
The Tools and Agencies Behind the Campaign
NC ran the creator side on a short list of tools and a handful of talent agencies.
NC wrote the chat messages, and the creators’ own chat bots posted them with NC’s tracking link.
These are the agencies that represented the paid creators.
- By market: Spain went through Vizz, Germany through INSIGHT, and North America through Mythic Talent, Loaded, UTA and Night.
- Mythic Talent: the most, with 25 creators, including Emiru, Xaryu and two War For Atreia captains, Stoopzz and Sonii, for 23.2% of the budget.
- Vizz: the biggest Spanish names, Rubius, elxokas and VEGETTA777, for 6.0% of the budget.
- Japan: its two biggest deals show no agency.
Content Volume and Platform Distribution
From September 28 to October 12 (one week either side of the free-to-play launch), AION 2 generated 128.7 million views across 25,205 pieces of content from 6,453 creators. That’s about half of Where Winds Meet (237.5M) and a quarter of ARC Raiders (508.9M), which is about right for an MMO whose Asian version had already been out for a year.
Most of the content was on Twitch: 17,591 of the 25,205 pieces (70%), worth 40.5M views. YouTube Videos had far fewer pieces (2,297) and more views (46.0M), then YouTube Shorts (18.2M), YouTube Streams (15.6M) and TikTok (7.4M).
Paid content was 13.7% of all views (17.6M). That’s above the 5% to 10% most AAA launches sit at, closer to Mecha BREAK (12%) and Borderlands 4 (17.9%) than to ARC Raiders (1.8%) or Where Winds Meet (0.9%). On Twitch it was 25.9%: one in four Twitch views of AION 2 came from a stream NC paid for. YouTube Shorts and TikTok, 25.6M views between them, got three paid pieces.
How I Counted the Budget
The budget comes from Streamforge’s AION 2 report. I also went through each paid stream and video to check the deal and sort it by these rules:
- Ad labels: a stream counts when it carries an ad label (#ad, #sponsored, #Werbung, #reklama, #publicidad, #PR, Publicité) or the creator says on air that it’s sponsored.
- War For Atreia: the drafted creators were under one deal, so every event stream counts, with or without an ad label.
- Creator Program: streams whose only sign of payment is the #AION2Partner tag are left out of the budget.
- Free copies: content made from a free Founder’s Pack or early access doesn’t count.
- Duplicates: re-uploads, simulcasts and restarted streams of the same deal count once.
- Twitch Sponsorship Dashboard: none of the deals ran through it. Every deal was bought from the creator or an agency.
How I Price Creators
Every paid delivery gets a market rate from the creator’s own channel numbers, and that rate is then scaled by where their audience lives.
Those are US rates. A viewer elsewhere is worth less to an advertiser, so each rate is scaled by the creator’s audience, country by country:
Real audiences are a mix, so on average English-speaking creators kept 84% of the US rate, German 75%, Japanese 51%, Spanish 28% and Portuguese 20%.
That gives an estimated budget of $1,466,901 across 672 paid deliveries from 183 creators.
Budget Allocation Breakdown
NC’s estimated $1,466,901 influencer marketing budget went mostly to Twitch: $1.43M, or 97.2%. That’s in line with past covered games: Mecha BREAK put 90% on Twitch, Elden Ring Nightreign 91%, Borderlands 4 81.2%. MMO players watch long streams, so NC bought streams.
YouTube Videos got 2.6%, $38k, and that’s one video. Rubius’s “Lo del AION 2 es SALVAJE” is worth $37,795 at market rates and pulled 2.78M views. Take it out and NC spent almost nothing on YouTube Videos, the platform with the most AION 2 views (46.0M). YouTube Streams got $2.7k, and Shorts and TikTok got almost nothing.
By route, direct deals were $1.12M (76.5%) across 189 deliveries from 101 creators. War For Atreia was $256k (17.5%), the Japanese festival $2.6k and the Creator Program $153. Another $84.9k went to 15 creators whose route I couldn’t see.
When the Money Landed
Almost half the money went to two days. Early access day (September 30) had 100 paid deliveries worth $362k, and launch day (October 5) had 94 worth $333k. Early access as a whole (September 29 to October 4) took $670k, 45.7% of the budget, and launch week took the other $797k.
Almost nothing came before. In the six weeks before early access, which covered gamescom and the Launch Scale Test, NC’s only paid creator content was five War For Atreia streams around the draft ($17.7k) and one Instagram reel. The Founder’s Packs sold anyway.
On launch day, most of NC’s paid streams were live at the same time. The servers opened at 13:00 UTC (6 a.m. in Los Angeles, 3 p.m. in Berlin), and 30 of the day’s 86 paid streams went live within an hour of that, most of them before the servers opened. The rest started through the afternoon. From 15:15 to 22:15 UTC, at least 40 paid streams were playing AION 2 at any moment, and the most at once was 54. At 20:00 UTC, AION 2’s busiest moment of the day on Twitch, 53 paid streams had 45% of everyone watching it.
That matters because of Twitch’s Browse page. It lists the categories with the most people watching first, so a game near the top gets seen by people looking for something new to watch. Overlapping paid streams push a game up that list.
- Early access day: #2 within half an hour of the servers opening, behind only Just Chatting, until 20:00 UTC. At that hour, paid streams had 59% of its 248,367 viewers.
- Launch day: #3 within an hour of the servers opening, up from #10, and #2 when the paid streams peaked, with 261,537 viewers at 20:00 UTC, ahead of Grand Theft Auto V and Counter-Strike.
- October 6: #1 at 07:00 UTC (4 p.m. in Tokyo), with 90,016 viewers to Just Chatting’s 87,961. About a fifth of them were watching one paid stream, stylishnoob4’s 28-hour launch stream (17,340 viewers).
- Overall: a median rank of #7 during early access and #5 in launch week, and in the top 10 for 95% of launch week’s hours.
Cost Efficiency Analysis
Twitch came in at $139 per thousand paid views, one of the cheapest Twitch CPMs in this series.
The reason is the two-hour block. NC paid for a couple of hours and got the whole stream: the median paid stream from a direct deal ran 3.2 hours, shroud played 11.5 hours on launch day, and stylishnoob4 played 28. Every extra hour adds views the sponsor never paid for.
YouTube Videos came in at $14, but that’s a single Rubius video. YouTube Streams were cheap at $13.
Market Capture Analysis
For AION 2, I defined a targeting group focused on Western-facing MMORPGs with a PC audience: Throne and Liberty, Black Desert, Lost Ark and Where Winds Meet.
AION 2 captured 20.4% of relevant Twitch creators (3,341 out of 16,356 who streamed at least one of the four in the past year) and 9.6% on YouTube (417 out of 4,338). For comparison, ARC Raiders holds the record at 47.4%, DOOM: The Dark Ages reached 17% on Twitch and 35% on YouTube, and Mecha BREAK sits at the bottom with 2% and 1%.
The core MMO crowd showed up. Of the Twitch creators who streamed Throne and Liberty in the past year, 45.9% also streamed AION 2. For Lost Ark it was 40.1%, and for Black Desert 34.8%. Where Winds Meet’s crowd is much bigger and broader (13,893 Twitch creators), and only 19.0% of it came over. That’s what pulls the average down.
It also leaves 13,015 Twitch creators and 3,921 YouTubers who play these games and haven’t touched AION 2 yet, most of them from Where Winds Meet. Those are the creators still left to reach after launch.
Channel Demographics
NC paid 183 creators. 56.0% stream in English, less than Borderlands 4 (70.4%) and more than Where Winds Meet (45.3%). Portuguese is second (9.9%), 14 of its 18 creators through War For Atreia, ahead of Japanese (9.3%), Spanish (8.8%) and German (8.2%). By country the US leads with 36.1%, and Germany is second again at 11.2%, ahead of Japan and Brazil (9.5% each).
That follows the server map: North America, Europe, South America and Japan, and NC paid in all four. It didn’t pay in proportion to who showed up, though. English-speaking creators were 37.0% of everyone who covered AION 2 and 56.0% of the paid list. Brazil was 8.6% of all creators and 9.5% of paid ones, but only because of War For Atreia: 13 of its 16 paid creators came through the event. And 7.8% of the creators who covered AION 2 spoke Russian. NC paid none of them.
25.3% of the paid creators are women (where Streamforge knows), about the same as Mecha BREAK (25%) and below Borderlands 4 (33%) and Where Winds Meet (40.7%). That’s not because the audience wasn’t there: 45.6% of all the creators who covered AION 2 were women, on the same measure. By age, 66.0% are 25-34 and 27.0% are 35-44, close to ARC Raiders (57.8% and 25.2%).
The Audience NC Reached
This is who the paid creators reached, weighted by the views of NC’s paid content (17.6M, re-uploads included).
- United States: 29.7% of the audience, against 36.1% of the paid creators. With Canada, North America was 33.0%.
- Spanish: 26.3% of the audience, from 8.8% of the paid creators. Those creators took only 10.5% of the money, because Spanish-speaking audiences price lower. Latin America alone was 22.7%, led by Mexico (6.2%), Brazil (4.6%) and Argentina (4.3%).
- Japan: 13.9%, more than Spain (8.2%) and Germany (3.5%) combined.
- Brazil: 4.6%, mostly from War For Atreia’s Latin American legions. Without the event, NC barely reached it.
- Age and gender: 68.3% were 18 to 34, one in ten were teenagers, and 70.2% were male.
Top Creators Hired
Performance = views/concurrent viewers compared to their 90 day average.
Sponsored content usually lands about 20% below a creator’s own average, so -20% is on par.
- Asmongold TV ($82,167, +18.3%): the biggest MMO streamer in the West, and the biggest buy of the launch: one stream on early access day. He said afterwards that NC “only wanted me to stream it for like an hour”, and he played longer. The YouTube upload of that session, “I finally tried the new MMO everyone is playing..”, added 1.73M views at no extra cost.
- Stoopzz ($78,190, +62.4%): a War For Atreia captain whose legion won, and the best performer in the top ten: ten event streams of 10 to 20 hours each.
- fps_shaka ($73,569, -55.3%): Japan’s biggest paid name. Three paid streams after launch, well below his usual numbers.
- Rubius ($67,065, -27.3%): one of the biggest Spanish-language creators. Two Twitch streams and a YouTube video with 2.78M views. About on par.
- Echo_Esports ($56,721, -92.8%): the esports team’s own channel. The worst number here, and mostly a pricing problem (see the Echo section), not a performance one.
- Maximum ($53,166, -81.1%): the best story on the list. He told chat NC’s agency cancelled his sponsor stream the day before because it had “already allocated all marketing expenses to other streamers”, and that NCSOFT stepped in and put it back. Both of his paid streams averaged under 1,000 viewers.
- stylishnoob4 ($51,678, +22.4%): three days of marathon streams and 1.9M views. One of the best returns on the list.
- Emiru ($46,960, -4.9%): two short sponsored blocks, 2.2 and 1.8 hours, inside her variety streams. On par.
- LIRIK ($46,814, +3.1%): early access and launch, five hours and two. Above par.
- Xaryu ($43,656, +3.2%): a World of Warcraft streamer, and Mythic Talent’s second name here. The standard package: one #ad stream in early access, one at launch. Above par.
Three of the top ten are Spanish or Japanese, even with their audiences priced lower. NC spent heavily outside the US.
My Thoughts
NC’s spending fit its audience. 97.2% went to Twitch, in two-hour blocks with big names, on the two days that sold something: Founder’s Packs on September 30 and the free download on October 5. On top of that, a creator league kept more than 50 mid-sized MMO streamers live for two weeks. The Twitch CPM was one of the best in this series, and AION 2 peaked at 397,905 on Steam, NC’s best launch there ever.
The paid side was big: 13.7% of all views. Where Winds Meet, another free-to-play launch, spent an estimated $319k and only 0.9% of its views were paid. NC spent more than four times as much, and that’s after pricing its audiences lower. Unpaid coverage was strong too. All Channels Drops put 4,025 channels on AION 2 on launch day, and 6,453 creators covered it in two weeks.
What I’d change is YouTube. YouTube Videos had the most AION 2 views of any platform, 46.0M, and almost all of NC’s money there went to one video. MMO YouTube (class guides, tier lists, “is it worth it” videos) is where players decide whether to stay after week one, and week one is where AION 2 slipped: the Steam score went from 76.2% positive to 58.1% by October 21.
And War For Atreia needs cleaner labels. It’s the best idea in this campaign, but from the outside it’s hard to tell which streams were paid. At least two creators said on air they were being paid, yet 249 of the event’s streams carried no ad label, and 30 of the 53 creators never used one. Dropping the label saved NC nothing and made a good event look worse than it was.
The Aftermath
Concurrent players on Steam. Source: SteamDB
- Steam peaks: 171,530 in early access (September 30), 397,905 on launch day (October 5), the highest ever for an NC game on Steam. Throne and Liberty’s record was 336,300.
- After launch: a weekend rebound to about 392,300 on October 11, then a 244,607 peak on October 22, 61% of launch day.
- Twitch: 262,150 peak viewers and 2.46M hours watched on launch day, and 16.99M hours in the launch week, fourth on Twitch.
- Reviews: 76.2% positive in early access, 58.1% (“Mixed”) by October 21.
Lessons for Marketers
- If you pay for a two-hour stream of an MMO, expect the creator to keep playing. NC’s direct-deal streams ran a median 3.2 hours, about an hour more per stream than NC paid for.
- Schedule paid streams to overlap. With 40 to 54 of them live at once through the afternoon and evening of launch day, AION 2 stayed at #2 or #3 on Twitch, where people browsing for something to watch saw it.
- A creator league keeps dozens of mid-sized streamers on your game for weeks. Ask them to label every stream, not just the first day.
- Budget for YouTube videos. YouTube had the most AION 2 views of any platform, and almost all of NC’s paid YouTube money went to one video.
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