Gaming Sponsorships: How to get sponsored for gaming (2023)

“Put that pad down! You’ll never make anything from gaming… concentrate on your schoolwork instead!”

Video games can bring huge benefits, including significant benefits to your bank balance if you play your cards right. In this article, we share info and tips on how to get sponsored for gaming.

Types of Sponsorships for Gaming

There are plenty of different ways that you can make your gaming pay. Sponsorship is one of the most lucrative ways and we reckon it also has the lowest barrier to entry (you don’t need a trillion Twitch followers to get some sort of sponsorship!).

Broadly speaking, the main types of gaming sponsorships are affiliate sponsorships, individual professional sponsorships and team sponsorships.

Gaming Affiliate Sponsorships

Affiliate deals are the easiest way to make money from video games. In general, affiliate marketing involves a third party encouraging customers to buy a particular product and taking a commission whenever a sale is made.

One of the most common affiliate models you’ll see in the gaming industry is product reviews – when a website or YouTuber is recommending a certain brand or product to you, it’s likely that they’re taking a little cut of any sales that come via the links they post.

For those of you who want to stick to actual gaming rather than stuff like reviews, you can also make money from affiliate deals by using or showcasing particular products in your Twitch streams.

Every gamer needs gear, right? So it would make sense for a gamer to prefer a particular chair, desk, PC, headset, streaming microphone. If you like using it and people are watching your streams, why not see if that brand has unique affiliate code they can share with you?

Twitch also has their own affiliate program. The qualifying conditions are pretty easy to achieve – you just need 50 followers, to have streamed for at least 8 hours and to have streamed on 7 separate days. Once you’re there, you can set up as a Twitch affiliate and unlock cheering with bits, subscriptions, ads, and plenty more on your channel.

Best Gaming Affiliate Programs

There are too many to list, but the table below should give you an idea of what’s available across different product types:

Brand	Product Type	Commission
Chairs4Gaming	Gaming Chairs	15%
Alienware	Gaming PCs	Up to 6%
KontrolFreek	Controllers	10%
Finalmouse	Mouses	25%
Steelseries	Headsets	8%
Razer	Various gear	20%
NordVPN	VPN	40%
Amazon Gaming	Games	20%

Gaming Professional Sponsorship (individual)

This sort of sponsorship is available to both pro and casual gamers in the sense that both esports players and casual streamers can bag themselves individual sponsorship deals with gaming brands.

A professional sponsorship is a clear step up from an affiliate arrangement, as you’ll be getting a set fee (either a lump sum or a regular payment) for promoting a particular brand or product.

Ever wondered why your favourite streamer always wears a Monster Energy cap or has a Steelseries poster on prominent display during every stream? Yeah, they might love those products, but it’s also likely that they’re being paid by those companies for the brand exposure.

Individual sponsorships are common across all sports. Roger Federer, for example, earns way, way more annually through endorsements and sponsorships than he does in prize money for winning tennis tournaments. It’s the same for many esports pros, and it’s not just the GOAT players that this applies to.

Individual sponsorships are, of course, much more difficult to secure than affiliate deals but, if you are able to bag one, they can be a lot more lucrative.

Gaming Professional Sponsorship (team)

esports team member competing in a tournament, demonstrating how to get sponsored for gaming

This sponsorship type is unfortunately not really an option for the casual gamer. The esports industry has exploded in recent years and that means some of the world’s biggest companies are now sniffing about esports teams in the hope of slapping their brand all over the most bankable squad.

It’s not all as cynical as that, though. Sponsorship deals are crucial for many teams, especially the smaller and less well-funded outfits who rely on sponsors’ money to be able to travel to events and compete.

How to Get Sponsored on Twitch

You could be the world’s best Overwatch player or the funniest gamer in the land, but if no-one sees your skills or hears your jokes, then you’re not gonna be able to monetize those talents, are you? Here are some quick tips for opening up sponsorship opportunities:

Build Your Brand

What’s your unique selling point? What is it about your streams that’s going to encourage people to follow and hopefully subscribe? If you’re all about speedrunning, for example, how does your set-up stand out from others already on the platform?

If you’re all about comedy, have you identified your target audience and timed your live streams to ensure they’re easy for that audience to watch?

Aside from those simple tips above about structuring your content on Twitch, it’s also vitally important to be active outside of Twitch and your streams, too. We’re talking about other social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and whatever else is popular these days.

You can use your activity on these platforms to promote and drive viewers towards your streams. Don’t underestimate their power and reach!

Engage With Your Viewers

One of the things that Twitch will judge you on if you apply for the partnership program (basically one step up from the affiliate program) is your engagement with viewers.

From the horse’s mouth: “People lurking in your channel isn’t enough, especially when there are ways that people can cheat to get around the system. Twitch will look at your engagement to see how active and genuine it is.”

Other sponsors will also want to see your viewers (or potential customers, as the sponsor will see them) engaging with your content as it’ll increase the chances that they’ll want to buy the sponsor’s product.

Make Sure Your Audio and Video Quality is Good

At ProCasual, there’s nothing that turns us off a stream more quickly than laggy video, patchy audio, or any other sort of quality issue. And I’m fairly sure that applies to any other viewer out there, too. There’s no point having great content if viewers can’t watch it.

If you’re serious about streaming and you want to attract sponsors, then it’s well worth investing in a good quality set-up. Other than the obvious stuff like a console or gaming PC and a reliable and fast internet connection, the basic requirements are a camera, a dedicated microphone, and maybe a decent headset and a lighting rig, too.

Be Proactive – Reach out to Potential Partners

Partners aren’t just going to land in your lap. Unless you’re already a well-known profile, if you want sponsors to give you money you’re probably going to have to reach out to them.

The obvious first step is to sign up for any affiliate schemes that you think will work. After that, you may find that a simple email to a brand with a convincing pitch about your follower count, engagement, and future plans for the channel might be enough to get a company to sign a more lucrative sponsorship agreement with you even if that’s not explicitly available on their website.

It’s important that you don’t just sell yourself out to the first company that offers you money or accepts you on to their affiliate program. What if they’re not a brand or product that your viewers are interested in buying? That might turn your fans away just as easily as poor audio/visual quality.

Ideally, you want to try and find sponsorship deals with products that you genuinely like to use and that you’re happy to be associated with. If you’re not sure whether hawking crypto investments is ethically sound, don’t do it!

Twitch Alternatives

A quick note to say that, although Twitch is by far and away the leading platform in the video gaming streaming space, it’s far from the only option. For example, Microsoft has their own platform called Mixer (they reportedly paid streaming superstar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins a whopping $30 million to ditch Twitch and stream exclusively on Mixer).

Just because Twitch is the daddy now doesn’t mean it always will be, so keep your options open!

Esports Sponsorships

As we’ve touched on above, sponsorship money really does make the sporting world go round. The annoying thing about esports sponsorships is that you generally have to be really, really good at a game for a company to want to sponsor you to compete either individually or as part of a team. That rules the entire ProCasual office out, but if you are at that level, then the world is your esports sponsorship oyster.

How to Get an Esports Sponsorship

Just like when trying to acquire sponsors for your stream, you’re going to have to do a bit of selling to get your name heard and your skills seen before anyone’s going to offer you an esports sponsorship.

Compete!

You gotta show people how good you are if you want a company to drop cash on you. That means finding different ways to compete, whether that’s through standard online ranking ladders, or by showing up at local LAN tournaments, or any other competitive formats you can find.

Build Your Brand & Connections

In addition to competing, it’s important to show potential sponsors more about you and your personal brand. One obvious way to do that is by streaming regularly on YouTube and/or Twitch (follow the tips above), while being active across social media is another way to boost your exposure and maximise your recognition in the industry.

Join or Create a Team

Even if you’re not quite good enough to compete for the megabucks prizes at the world’s biggest esports events, there’s no reason not to join a team to get started. It could be a group of mates from school, a squad of colleagues from work, or a clan you’ve been invited to online. You never know where it might take you! Being in a team gives you more support, more opportunities to compete and, ultimately, more exposure.

Biggest Esports Sponsors

If you are good enough at a particular game to attract sponsors, you could be on to a winner. Loads of big brands see esports as the next big thing and a key avenue for marketing their products to a lucrative demographic. Here’s a list of some of the most high-profile esports sponsorship deals to date:

Intel & ESL: $100m, three-year esports sponsorship deal
US Air Force: Sponsorship of the Cloud9 CS:GO team
Alienware: 10-year deal with Team Liquid
Betway: Six-figure sponsorship deal with Ninjas in Pyjamas
Rocket League: Multiple deals with major car manufacturers
Mountain Dew: ESL’s official global beverage partner

How to get sponsored for gaming: Conclusion

For most of us, gaming is a hobby and we’re not too fussed (or don’t have enough time or energy) to take it any further than that. However, if you want to make some money from playing games – or potentially build a career from it – then you’ll need to know how best to monetize your talents.

Sponsorships are probably the easiest way to bring in some dollar for your gaming output, and there are loads of different options to suit the hardened pros, the couch casuals, and pretty much everyone in between.