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 Phantom Blade Zero, a kung fu action game from S-GAME, a studio in Beijing. It launched on October 29, 2026 on PC and PlayStation 5, where it’s a console exclusive for its first year.
It’s an odd one. When it came out, the biggest names in gaming were talking about it, and S-GAME and PlayStation paid almost none of them. In launch week they paid 32 small creators an estimated $58,530, and those posts got about 300,000 views. NVIDIA paid more than they did. And Asmongold, who nobody paid, got 14 times their views on his own.
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 S-GAME, PlayStation or NVIDIA, and all budget figures are estimates based on publicly available data and market rates from Streamforge’s algorithm.
New YouTube Channel for people that hate reading
Like last time, this article has a video version on YouTube. Same story, but with the streams, the chats and the reviews playing on screen. Instead of being glued to your screen, pull this one up in your living room, kick your feet back and brace yourself to be assaulted with data.
Click the thumbnail to get taken to the YouTube video for this article. And don’t forget to subscribe =)
Watch the video version on YouTube
A Chronological Overview
S-GAME built this launch on PlayStation’s stage and on events where creators could play it. Paid creator posts came last.
- 2008: Liang Qiwei, a university student in China, makes a kung fu game alone in RPG Maker, Rainblood: Town of Death. More than four million people download it.
- 2011: He founds S-GAME. In 2021, Tencent buys a quarter of the studio. He says Phantom Blade Zero cost $45M to $60M to make.
- May 2023: Revealed at a PlayStation Showcase.
- 2024: A demo tour: Summer Game Fest, ChinaJoy, Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show.
- July 2025: S-PARTY, S-GAME’s own event in Beijing, with about 200 creators from China and abroad. PlayStation and NVIDIA sponsor it.
- December 2025: The Game Awards trailer sets a September 9, 2026 date.
- January 6 to 9, 2026: A near-final build plays at Hisense’s booth at CES.
- June 2: A State of Play delays it 50 days, to October 29.
- August 11: Pre-orders open, and it goes straight to number one on Steam’s top sellers.
- August 17: PlayStation gives it a State of Play of its own, the first for a single Chinese game. Donnie Yen, who did the motion capture for one of its characters, is in it.
- September: A six-hour preview in Los Angeles for creators and press, with their travel paid.
- October 26: Reviews go live: 88 on Metacritic.
- October 29: Launch. TikTok opens its own campaign for the game, and the paid streams start.
- November 1: Steam peaks at 833,921 players at once.
What stands out is when the creator money moved. S-GAME’s own events with creators came months and even a year before launch. The paid posts came after the reviews, and none went up before launch day.
Events Instead of a Demo
Phantom Blade Zero never had a public demo. A demo page showed up on the PlayStation Store in August and was pulled. For three years, the only way to play it before launch was at an event.
So S-GAME brought creators to the game. In July 2025 it threw S-PARTY in Beijing, with more than 1,000 players and about 200 creators, more than 40 of them flown in from abroad. S-GAME says the event’s livestreams drew more than 20 million viewers.
In September, it brought creators and press to Los Angeles to play for six hours. RPGFan wrote that S-GAME was “covering my flight, lodging, and meals.”
None of that is in the budget below. It’s spend I can’t see in the data, and it all happened before the launch window.
Review Day
Reviews went live on October 26. Phantom Blade Zero scored 88 on Metacritic, the highest ever for a game from China.
The biggest paid review that day wasn’t paid for by S-GAME. Skill Up’s opened with “This video is brought to you by Nvidia.” NVIDIA paid for it to sell graphics cards, and it got 934,596 views, more than twice his normal.
The next day, Asmongold watched IGN’s review on his stream. Nobody paid him, and the upload got more than 1.3 million views.
The reviews moved buyers. The day before they went live, US players were spending about $106K a day on the game on Steam, according to Alinea Analytics. Two days after, it was $899K a day.
Review Copies
S-GAME also sent free copies to creators. 18 posts made with those copies got 3.8M views, 13 times the views of everything S-GAME and PlayStation paid for.
Almost all of those views were YouTube videos. gameranx’s “Before You Buy” got 1.6M views, about twice its normal. MLZLZ (797K) and Hollow (478K) beat their normal too. Hollow opened with: “A big thank you to Sgame Studio for the early copy to this game.”
In China it went the other way. A Bilibili creator said none of them got to play it early this time, and players there praised the studio for it.
TikTok’s Launch Campaign
At launch, TikTok opened its own campaign for the game, “Phantom Blade Zero: Enter The Wulin”. Creators who posted clips or streamed it earned points, and the ones at the top won Diamonds, which they can cash out.
In the first hours, dozens of small clip pages posted clips with the same hashtags, marked as paid partnerships. None of them say who paid. 55 of those posts, from 32 clip pages, got 7,213 views between them. Since none names a payer, I left them all out of S-GAME and PlayStation’s budget.
Then almost 5,000 other accounts joined in. On launch day alone they posted more than 16,000 clips, and more than half got under 50 views.
All together, the campaign’s clips got 8.6M views, and half of those views came from just 18 clips.
Sponsored Streams on Twitch
On Twitch, S-GAME and PlayStation sponsored 25 streamers for 26 streams. Some said so on air. bings, in Singapore, opened with: “Today is a special stream with PlayStation Asia.” Two titles named Lingyoufang, S-GAME’s company name in Chinese.
Many came through Twitch’s own sponsorship program. On August 20, Twitch opened it to Affiliates, its smaller streamers, if they passed a certification first. iAnnihilate described it on his stream: “I had to read like 14 web pages and then take a quiz on what I read to be able to do these, to be certified.” ProxyGinger told his German chat what the pay depends on: “It always depends on how many people watch.”
18 of the 26 streams averaged under 200 viewers. All 26 together averaged about 4,600. On launch night, Emiru alone averaged almost 14,000, three times as many. Nobody paid her.
On PC, the game had to prepare its graphics (compile shaders) before it would start, and on some of these streams that took 15 to 25 minutes. So the paid part of the stream opened on a loading bar. The biggest paid stream, PSP1G’s, played other games for six hours before it got to Phantom Blade Zero. Then its chat watched the bar for 16 minutes. One viewer wrote: “they never getting a sponsor ever again LOL”.
TeamAmerica said he “figured the shaders would compile while I did the ad read.” Seven minutes later, still waiting, he said: “Okay, I’m just going to cancel the sponsorship.”
None of it slowed the game down on Twitch. At one point on launch day, 146,000 people were watching it, more than any other single-player game. But PC players had the same wait, and only 79% of its Steam reviews were positive on launch day. A week later, after patches, it was 91%.
Japan and China
In Japan, PlayStation paid four YouTube channels for 21 videos, each marked #PR, mostly walkthroughs. That’s an estimated $31,250, more than half the budget. IRONBOY GAMES posted 15 of them, about two a day for a week, and they got about half of the channel’s normal views.
China was the biggest market. Alinea Analytics puts mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong at 45% of the game’s revenue by early November. There, PlayStation spent on places and partners. It had a giant wall painted in Chongqing with a countdown to launch day, and China Mobile ran a 48-hour launch stream on its Migu app, with ten streamers taking turns.
My data doesn’t cover China’s own platforms (Bilibili, Douyin, Huya), so I can’t say who got paid there. On the platforms I do track, 27.3% of the creators who covered the game spoke Chinese, and S-GAME and PlayStation paid none of them.
The Partners
Add it up, and S-GAME and PlayStation paid 32 creators an estimated $58,530, and their posts got about 300,000 views. NVIDIA paid 11 creators an estimated $99,254, and their posts got 1.5M views, five times as many. Skill Up’s review alone was $32,457.
NVIDIA wasn’t the only one. Hisense, the game’s official TV partner, paid a Russian channel, IGM, an estimated $20,914 for one video, which got 174,885 views. ROG paid two creators, and five more brands paid ten. All together, partners paid 24 creators an estimated $134,970, more than twice what S-GAME and PlayStation spent.
They weren’t always on the same page. With its day-one patch, S-GAME told players with NVIDIA cards to go back to an older driver, instead of the one NVIDIA had just released for the game.
Content Volume and Platform Distribution
From October 22 to November 5 (one week either side of launch), Phantom Blade Zero generated 216.2 million views across 38,646 pieces of content from 10,853 creators on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram and X. That’s about the same as Borderlands 4 (218M) and Elden Ring Nightreign (214.7M), and well above AION 2 (128.7M). The game’s official accounts got about 15M of it. None of these numbers include China’s own platforms.
YouTube was where people watched. YouTube Videos had 91.4M views, 42% of the total, then TikTok (38.1M), YouTube Shorts (35.1M) and YouTube Streams (30.9M). TikTok had half of all the pieces (19,588), most of them from its campaign. Twitch had 7,100 pieces and 12.7M views, about 6%.
What S-GAME and PlayStation paid for was 0.14% of all views (300K). That’s the lowest in past articles, below Elden Ring Nightreign (0.3%), DOOM: The Dark Ages (1%) and Final Fantasy Resonance (1.7%), and far under the 5% to 10% most AAA launches sit at. Counting what the partners paid for, it was 1.0%.
How I Counted the Budget
The budget comes from Streamforge’s Phantom Blade Zero report. I also went through each paid stream, video and clip to check the deal and who paid for it, and sorted them by these rules:
- Ad labels: a post counts when it carries an ad label (#ad, #sponsored, #PR, a paid-partnership tag) or the creator says on air that it’s sponsored.
- Who paid: S-GAME and PlayStation’s budget only counts posts they paid for. YouTube videos count when they name S-GAME, PlayStation or Sony. Sponsored Twitch streams of the game in launch week count, whether or not the streamer named the sponsor on air.
- TikTok: the launch-night clips marked as paid partnerships don’t name a payer, and TikTok was running its own campaign at the same time, so they’re out.
- Partners: posts NVIDIA, Hisense, ROG and other brands paid for are counted on their own, not as S-GAME’s spend.
- Free copies: content made from a free review copy doesn’t count.
- Duplicates: re-uploads and restarted streams of the same deal count once, and a sponsored stream that never ran doesn’t count.
How I Price Creators
Every paid post gets a market rate from the creator’s own channel numbers.
These are US rates, used for every creator wherever their audience lives. That gives an estimated budget of $58,530 across 50 paid posts from 32 creators.
Budget Allocation Breakdown
S-GAME and PlayStation’s estimated $58,530 influencer marketing budget went mostly to YouTube Videos: $42.4K, or 72.5%. Twitch got $16.0K (27.4%), and one YouTube Short got $85.
That’s the smallest budget in past articles. Final Fantasy Resonance was $64,752 and DOOM: The Dark Ages $237k. It’s also the biggest YouTube share. Most past launches put most of the money on Twitch: AION 2 97.2%, Elden Ring Nightreign 91% and Mecha BREAK 90%. The closest was ARC Raiders, with 62.8% on YouTube Videos.
That’s closer to where people watched than most past launches. YouTube Videos had 42% of the views and got 72.5% of the money. Twitch had about 6% of the views and got 27.4%. TikTok and YouTube Shorts had a third of the views and got $85. And more than half the budget ($31,250) went to the 21 Japanese videos.
When the Money Landed
Nothing paid went up before launch day. Then two thirds of the money landed in three days: October 29 to 31 had 31 of the 50 posts and 68% of the budget. October 30 was the biggest day, $19.3K, led by Nessaj Gaming’s Hungarian video and three Japanese channels.
After that came a tail of small Twitch streams and IRONBOY’s daily walkthroughs, through November 5. The creator events S-GAME ran itself came much earlier: S-PARTY 15 months before launch, and the Los Angeles preview a few weeks before.
Cost Efficiency Analysis
Streams are measured by what each average viewer cost (CPACV), and videos by what 1,000 views cost (CPM).
Twitch came in at $3.49 per average viewer, the highest in past articles: AION 2 was $1.85 and Final Fantasy Resonance $2.76. At these rates, a stream that holds its usual audience costs $2.50 per average viewer. Together, these held about 72% of theirs.
YouTube Videos came in at $150 per 1,000 views, about the same as Borderlands 4 and DOOM: The Dark Ages ($148), and about twice Final Fantasy Resonance ($77). The paid videos got about half their channels’ normal views, which doubles the cost of each view. The one paid Short came in at $46.
Market Capture Analysis
For Phantom Blade Zero, I defined a targeting group of action games with an Asian setting: Nioh 3, Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Black Myth: Wukong.
Phantom Blade Zero captured 22.4% of relevant Twitch creators (1,824 out of 8,143 who streamed at least one of the three in the past year) and 13.6% on YouTube (701 out of 5,140). On Twitch, that’s the best in past articles after ARC Raiders’ record (47.4%), ahead of AION 2 (20.4%) and DOOM: The Dark Ages (17%). On YouTube, DOOM is still ahead (35%), and AION 2 had 9.6%. Final Fantasy Resonance had 5.8% and 8.7%, and Mecha BREAK sits at the bottom with 2% and 1%.
The Nioh 3 and Onimusha crowds came over. 29.7% of the Twitch creators who streamed Nioh 3 in the past year also streamed Phantom Blade Zero, and 29.5% of Onimusha’s. Black Myth: Wukong, which came out two years ago, came over least (14.4%). Creators who play all three came over most: of the 91 Twitch creators who streamed all three, 53 (58.2%) streamed Phantom Blade Zero too, and on YouTube 46 of 135 (34.1%).
It still leaves 6,319 Twitch creators and 4,439 YouTubers who play these games and haven’t touched Phantom Blade Zero yet.
Channel Demographics
S-GAME and PlayStation paid 32 creators. 53.1% of them post in English, less than Final Fantasy Resonance (76.3%) and Borderlands 4 (70.4%), and about the same as AION 2 (56.0%). Japanese is second (15.6%), then Portuguese (9.4%), German and French (6.3% each). By country the US leads with 25.9%, then Japan and Germany (14.8% each) and Brazil (11.1%).
That doesn’t follow who covered the game. English-speaking creators were 41.6% of everyone who covered Phantom Blade Zero and 53.1% of the paid list. Chinese-speaking creators were 27.3% of everyone, and none of them were paid.
One of the 20 paid creators Streamforge has gender data for is a woman: 5%, the lowest in past articles, below Splitgate 2 (13%) and ARC Raiders (18.6%). Among all the creators who covered the game, it was 22.1%.
The Audience S-GAME and PlayStation Reached
This is who the paid creators reached, weighted by the views of the paid content.
- Japan: 44.9% of the audience, mostly from the four Japanese YouTube channels.
- United States: 22.3%. With Canada (5.4%), North America was 27.7%.
- Hungary: 19.6%, almost all from Nessaj Gaming’s one video.
- United Kingdom: 3.1%.
- China: under 0.1%, and Chinese speakers were 0.7%. On the platforms I track, the game’s biggest market barely saw a paid post.
- Age and gender: 65.9% were 18 to 34, 12.4% were teenagers, and 63.9% were male.
Top Creators Hired
Performance = views/concurrent viewers as a share of their 90 day average.
Sponsored content usually lands at about 80% of a creator’s own average, so 80% of normal is on par.
- IRONBOY GAMES ($14,016, 50% of normal): a Japanese walkthrough channel. PlayStation paid for 15 videos, from launch day to November 4. They got half of the channel’s normal views.
- ピコピコちゃん ($12,064, 18%): a Japanese gameplay channel. Four videos, through the last boss and the ending, at under a fifth of its normal views.
- Nessaj Gaming ($7,429, 62%): a Hungarian YouTuber. One video on October 30, through the agency Penta Media Group with a code from Sony. Under par, and still almost a fifth of the whole paid audience.
- Hyped4 ($3,733, 108%): an English-language YouTube channel based in Germany. A first look on the PS5 Pro, sponsored by S-GAME. The only one of the top ten above its normal.
- PSP1G ($3,041, 79%): the biggest paid Twitch stream, with 958 average viewers. Six hours of other games, then the 16-minute wait. About on par.
- けまいチャンネル ($2,849, 24%) and いーさん ($2,321, 38%): the other two Japanese channels, one video each.
- Dekkster ($2,215, 20%): a US Twitch streamer. One #sponsored stream, at a fifth of his normal viewers.
- olagheparande ($926, 37%) and furq ($906, 50%): a Persian-language streamer in Iran, and a Brazilian streamer whose #ad title named Lingyoufang.
The top five took 68.8% of the budget, and the top ten 84.6%. The median paid creator landed at about 80% of normal, right on par, and 16 of the 32 were at par or better. Twitch held up better than YouTube: the median paid stream got 85% of its normal viewers, and the median paid YouTube post 37% of its normal views.
Where the Views Came From
In the two weeks around launch, creators’ videos, streams and clips of the game got about 200 million views, and the official accounts about 15 million. Almost none of it was paid.
Asmongold played it live on five days of launch week, with 24,000 to 31,000 average viewers each time, and his YouTube uploads got 3.6M views. All together he got 4.3M views, 14.4 times everything S-GAME and PlayStation paid for. On stream he said: “I think the game’s awesome. I do. I think this game is super good.”
The most-watched launch-day stream on YouTube or Twitch was in Thailand. Heartrocker’s first stream of it got 774,216 views. Nobody paid him either.
And on TikTok, a clip of an early boss fight from GitGudSoon got 753,840 views, about 19 times what that account normally gets.
My Thoughts
Most of what I can see S-GAME do with creators happened before launch: events and trips. In launch week, S-GAME and PlayStation paid 32 creators an estimated $58,530, the smallest budget in past articles, and those posts got 0.14% of the views. The partners paid more, and almost all of the views came from creators nobody paid.
That worked because the game was good and the reviews were strong. An 88 on Metacritic got the big names talking. Asmongold and gameranx alone got 5.9M views, more than every paid post put together, S-GAME’s and the partners’. The best creator spend S-GAME made was probably the free copies: 18 posts, 13 times the views of the paid ones.
What I’d change is the Twitch buy. 26 small streams together drew a third of what Emiru drew alone, and on PC several of them opened the paid segment on the same wait that helped pull the Steam reviews down to 79%. I’d have put that money into fewer, bigger streams on PS5, where there was no wait.
I’d also plan with the partners. NVIDIA paid more than S-GAME and PlayStation and got five times the views, and then S-GAME’s patch notes told players to skip NVIDIA’s new driver. When partners spend more on creators than you do, it’s worth running it as one campaign.
The Aftermath
- Steam peak: 833,921 players at once on November 1, the 14th highest ever on Steam, and second among 2026 releases behind Palworld’s 1.0 (961,867).
- Sales: more than 4 million copies in 72 hours, across platforms (S-GAME).
- Revenue: about $223M by November 3, from 4.3M copies (Alinea Analytics).
- Who bought: on launch day, players outside China spent more on it on Steam than players in China for the first time. By early November, mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were 45% of revenue.
- Reviews: 88 on Metacritic, the highest for a game from China. On Steam, 79% positive on launch day and 91% of English reviews a week later.
- Twitch: 146,000 people watching at one point on launch day, more than any other single-player game.
Lessons for Marketers
- If the reviews are strong, get copies to the right YouTubers early. Here 18 posts made with free copies got 13 times the views of 50 paid ones.
- If you sponsor PC streams, make sure the game is running before the ad read starts. Have creators compile shaders before they go live, or send PS5 codes.
- Plan creator work with your hardware partners. NVIDIA’s 11 creators got five times the views of S-GAME and PlayStation’s 32.
If you’d been S-GAME, would you have paid the big streamers?
Want to See More Data?
Everything in this article came from Streamforge, our reporting and competitive analysis tool. Once you’re set up, you can do what I did here on your own, for any game or product you want.
Book a demo and I’ll show you how it works.
