Why game studios should use Jestr

Before Jestr, running ads for a game used to mean one of two things: spend a lot of money on paid placements and hope the targeting works, or spend a lot of time reaching out to content creators one by one, hope they say yes, and hope it actually moves the needle.

Neither of those options is particularly good, especially for studios working with limited budgets. And yet for years they were basically the only options on the table, until Jestr was founded.

The Problem With Traditional Ads

Paid ads on social platforms can work, but they come with a set of problems that make them a bad fit for most game marketing.

• You're paying regardless of whether the ad performs. A bad creative, a wrong audience, or a poorly timed campaign costs the same as a successful one. For a studio with a tight marketing budget, that risk is hard to absorb.
• They feel too much like ads. Consumers have become extremely good at ignoring paid placements. A well-targeted ad can still get ignored simply because of how it looks or how it feels.
• They don't build anything lasting. When the budget runs out, the ads stop. You don't come away with content that continues to work for you, or creators who are genuinely invested in talking about or playing what you made.

What Jestr Campaigns Do Differently

When a real person makes a video about your game, in their own voice, for an audience that already trusts them, there's always going to be a better return on investment.

It's content that someone chose to make, presented to an audience that chose to follow them. It's the same content they would have produced anyway regardless of whether they get paid or not, but you guarantee that it's going to be about your game.

That distinction matters more than most studios realize. Viewers trust creators they follow in a way they will never trust a paid placement. When a creator talks about a game they're genuinely interested in, their audience reacts differently.

Creator content also has a shelf life that ads don't. A video posted by a creator doesn't disappear when a campaign ends. It keeps getting views, keeps getting recommended, and keeps sending people toward your game page even after the initial push. Some of the best performing creator videos for games show up in search results and recommendations months after they were first posted.

Another perk is that creator content is shareable in a way ads aren't. People send interesting videos to their friends, but nobody sends a traditional ad.

Why Jestr Specifically Makes This Easy

The problem with traditional influencer marketing is that it's time-consuming, inconsistent, and hard to scale. Jestr removes all of that friction.

Studios set up a campaign on the platform, including budget, payout rate per 1,000 views, guidelines, and optional talking points.

Creators then browse available campaigns, pick the games that interest them, make videos in their own style, post across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, and get paid automatically based on performance.

The performance-based structure is important. You're not paying for a creator's time or their follower count, but rather, you're paying for actual views. If a video doesn't perform, your spend reflects that. If it goes viral, you pay more because it delivers more. The budget goes exactly where the results are.

Jestr is also accessible to studios of any size. Small studios with modest marketing budgets can get their game in front of millions of viewers through creators who are genuinely interested in what they made. Large studios can scale their marketing massively through the same system.

What the Numbers Look Like

Jestr has helped over 700 games generate more than 1.75 billion views across short-form platforms. Jestr also ran over 1,000 successful campaigns in less than a year. During Steam Next Fest in June 2026, 15 of the 50 most-played game demos had run campaigns through Jestr.

For studios that have tried traditional ads and found the ROI hard to justify, or tried individual influencer outreach and found it too slow and inconsistent, this is the platform that fixes their problems.

Traditional ads have their place. For certain games, certain budgets, and certain goals, they make sense. But for most game studios, creator-led campaigns on Jestr offer something traditional ads simply can't: real people making real content about your game, for audiences that actually want to watch it, at a cost that reflects the results you get.

That's a fundamentally different proposition, and for the studios that have figured that out, it's not really a close comparison anymore. You need to get on the Jestr train.