The Call of Duty League signed a multi-year deal with social media site Twitter and added the United States Army as a new sponsor. The news comes not long after Activision confirmed that the Call of Duty League would be shown exclusively on YouTube.
It has been confirmed that the Call of Duty League now has a deal that makes Twitter the official home of real-time highlights for the eSports competition. Twitter has also created hashtag emojis for each team in the Call of Duty League and fans will be able to use Twitter’s lists and topics features to get news about the team or teams that they care about most.
Twitter has had an important role in the games industry for some time, and it’s often where fans go to share gaming memes and to talk about their favorite games. However, some may be surprised that the Call of Duty League is the eSports event that Twitter chose to make a deal with, as Call of Duty isn’t in the top 10 games talked about on Twitter.
Call of Duty’s deal with the US Army is less surprising. The US Army will sponsor the Call of Duty League for a year, and its marketing will be shown in various streams of the competition. Army recruitment has slowed heavily in the last few years and in a 2017 Defense Department survey, just 11% of young people said that they are likely to join the military. The Call of Duty League, which has a mostly young male viewership, could help grow the forces in a big way.
This year, Activision has made a huge amount of money from its eSports leagues, with its YouTube streaming deal rumored to have made the company $160 million. Activision also makes money from the ads shown in its streams. Fans made memes about the Cheez-It Overwatch League ads, and while some viewers weren’t happy with them, they likely made Activision hundreds of thousands of dollars– if not more.
Deals like this one with Twitter may also be making it millions of dollars, and there is potential to sign deals like that for Overwatch League highlights. Fans have been making Overwatch League highlights and sometimes being hit with copyright notices for them, but the deal shows that Activision is thinking hard about new ways to make money from its eSports leagues.
Source: Sports Pro Media, Marine Corps Times
