Can a single company really control 95 percent of a market nobody has agreed how to measure? That’s the question GameSquare’s headline-grabbing claim forced onto marketing desks across the gaming industry. The number sounded impressive in a press release. It fell apart under basic scrutiny. And it exposed something every brand spending money on gaming creators already suspected: the creator economy metrics problem in gaming is worse than almost anywhere else in influencer marketing.
The Claim That Broke the Calculator
GameSquare, a publicly traded gaming and esports media company, told investors and trade press that it commanded roughly 95 percent share of the gaming creator marketing market. For a sector that includes agencies, in-house teams at publishers, talent management shops, and dozens of mid-size networks, that figure should have triggered immediate skepticism. It didn’t get enough of it, at least not at first.
Here’s the problem in plain terms: nobody in gaming creator marketing agrees on what “the market” even is. Is it ad spend routed through creator agencies? Total influencer marketing budget across gaming brands? Unique creators under management? Views delivered? Revenue attributed to creator campaigns? Depending on which denominator you pick, a company can plausibly claim dominance in one narrow slice while controlling a fraction of the actual spend flowing through gaming influencer marketing.
A 95 percent share claim in a market with no agreed definition isn’t a data point. It’s a marketing tactic dressed up as a data point.
Where Do These Numbers Actually Come From?
Ask most companies making big market share claims how they calculated it, and you’ll get a vague answer involving “internal analysis” or a third-party report that conveniently isn’t public. That’s not unique to GameSquare. It’s standard practice across the creator economy, where self-reported reach numbers, inflated follower counts, and cherry-picked benchmarks have been normalized for years.
The gaming vertical makes this worse for a specific reason: creator activity is scattered across Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Kick, each with different measurement standards, different definitions of an “active” viewer, and different willingness to share raw data with third parties. A company can legitimately dominate Twitch-adjacent sponsorship deals while having almost no footprint on TikTok gaming content, and still describe itself as controlling “the market.”
Compare that to more mature reporting environments. eMarketer’s ad spend benchmarks and Statista’s platform usage data at least publish methodology notes. Most gaming creator market share claims don’t. That gap between “the number sounds authoritative” and “the number is verifiable” is exactly where brand budgets get misallocated.
Why Gaming Sits at the Center of This Problem
Gaming creator marketing grew fast and messy. Unlike beauty or fashion influencer marketing, which built up a decade of case studies, agency standards, and platform-native measurement tools, gaming scaled through esports sponsorships, Twitch subscriptions, and brand deals that were negotiated deal by deal with almost no industry-wide reporting framework.
That fragmentation created an opening for any single company with enough visibility to claim outsized influence. It’s the same dynamic playing out across the broader creator ecosystem, where middle layer platforms and agencies now sit between brands and creators, each with their own dashboards, their own definitions of engagement, and their own incentive to report favorable numbers upward.
Add in the fact that gaming audiences skew younger, watch time is harder to verify across livestream formats, and cross-platform clipping (a Twitch stream chopped into fifty TikTok clips) makes attribution genuinely difficult, and you get a market where confident-sounding numbers travel faster than accurate ones.
What This Means for Brands Writing the Checks
If you’re a brand or agency evaluating a gaming creator partner, the GameSquare episode should function as a warning label, not a headline. Market share claims without disclosed methodology are not evidence of capability. They’re marketing copy.
The practical risk isn’t reputational embarrassment for the company making the claim. It’s budget misallocation for the brands relying on it. If you’re choosing a creator agency or platform partner based on an unverified dominance claim, you’re effectively outsourcing your due diligence to someone else’s press release.
- Ask for the denominator. Share of what, exactly? Spend, creators, impressions, or something else?
- Ask for the data source. Internal tracking, third-party audit, or platform-provided figures?
- Ask what’s excluded. A claim covering “gaming influencer agencies” that excludes in-house publisher teams or TikTok-native creators isn’t measuring the market, it’s measuring a segment.
This connects to a broader shift already underway in creator marketing measurement. Brands are increasingly demanding proof over promises, which is why the industry has moved toward revenue-linked reporting mandates instead of accepting reach and impression claims at face value. Gaming needs the same rigor, and it’s arriving late.
Vanity Metrics Are Losing Ground, Slowly
The good news is that the broader industry is already correcting course, even if gaming lags. Platforms have started deprioritizing raw view counts in favor of watch-through and save rates, signals that correlate more directly with actual audience attention and, eventually, purchase intent. That shift matters for gaming brands specifically, because view counts have long been the easiest number to inflate through clip farming and bot-adjacent engagement.
Standardized measurement won’t come from platforms alone. Trade bodies, agencies, and brand-side marketing teams need to push for shared definitions the way digital advertising eventually standardized around viewability and verified impressions. The HubSpot marketing benchmark reports that many brand teams already reference for broader digital marketing don’t yet have a gaming-specific creator economy equivalent with comparable rigor. That’s the gap someone needs to fill.
Until gaming creator marketing adopts shared definitions for reach, share, and value, every market share claim is really just a confidence trick backed by selective math.
There’s also a compliance dimension brands can’t ignore. As creator programs scale, the same lack of standardization that muddies market share claims also complicates disclosure and payment tracking. Programs that grow faster than their reporting infrastructure tend to run into exactly the kind of operational risk covered in enterprise creator scaling breakdowns, where legal and finance systems can’t keep pace with campaign volume. Regulators are watching too. The FTC’s endorsement guidance already requires clear disclosure standards for influencer partnerships, and inflated or unverifiable performance claims made to investors and clients sit uncomfortably close to that same scrutiny.
The Hiring Angle Nobody’s Talking About
One underappreciated symptom of gaming’s metrics problem: job postings. Marketing teams building out gaming creator programs are now hiring specifically for measurement and reporting infrastructure, not just campaign execution, a trend documented in broader creator hiring shifts toward revenue infrastructure. That’s a tell. Brands are building internal capability precisely because they can’t fully trust the numbers agencies and platforms hand them.
If your organization is running gaming creator campaigns and still relying entirely on partner-reported metrics without an internal verification layer, you’re behind where the market is heading. The companies pulling ahead are the ones building their own attribution stack, even if it’s imperfect, rather than accepting someone else’s 95 percent claim at face value.
The Takeaway
Treat any unverified market share claim in gaming creator marketing as a sales pitch, not a benchmark. Before signing with a partner, demand the denominator, the data source, and what’s excluded, then build your own attribution layer so your program’s success doesn’t depend on someone else’s math.
FAQs
What did GameSquare actually claim?
GameSquare stated it held approximately 95 percent market share in gaming creator marketing, a figure widely questioned once analysts asked which spend, creators, or platforms the claim actually covered.
Why is market share so hard to measure in gaming creator marketing?
Gaming creator activity spans Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Kick, each with different metrics and disclosure standards, and there is no industry-wide agreement on what counts as the total addressable market.
How should brands vet creator agency claims before signing a contract?
Ask for the specific denominator behind any share or reach claim, request the underlying data source, and clarify what segments of the market were excluded from the calculation.
Are vanity metrics like views still reliable in gaming influencer marketing?
Less so than before. Many platforms and brands now weight watch-through rate and save behavior more heavily than raw view counts, since views are easier to inflate through clipping and low-quality engagement.
What’s the compliance risk of inflated creator market claims?
Overstated performance claims made to investors or clients can draw regulatory attention, particularly given existing FTC disclosure requirements around endorsements and marketing representations.
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