Domino’s and Peloton will be the first brands in Twitch’s new Fortnite game “The Glitch,” giving marketers a new opportunity to partner with streamers and get in front of gamers on the platform. 

First teased at Amazon’s inaugural upfront presentation in May, “The Glitch” is a Fortnite map where brands can build playable zones using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite—an application for designing, developing and publishing experiences within the Epic Games title. Twitch revealed more details about “The Glitch,” which launches on Sept. 20, ahead of its annual convention in San Diego this weekend.

The Domino’s and Peloton experiences will roll out in October. Domino’s reimagines a classic multiplayer combat experience, while Peloton leans into noncombative gameplay. Domino’s game will also include a fully-modeled Domino’s pizzeria where players can climb to the roof and engage in a “pizza party” to restore their health.

“The Glitch” is part of Twitch’s broader effort to get streamers more involved in its brand partnerships, said Rachel Delphin, chief marketing officer at Twitch.

“We’re always looking for new opportunities to engage streamers and their communities,” Delphin said. “Ads play a really important role in supporting our streamers directly and certainly a really important role in getting brands in front of and impacting the folks they’re trying to reach.”

Streamers can make 55% of net ad revenue by running at least three minutes of ads per hour.

“The Glitch” adds another element to Twitch’s ad offering that doesn’t rely on mid-roll ads, which can interrupt livestreams.

“Our goal with The Glitch was to organically incorporate Peloton branding without being disruptive to the overall gaming experience,” Joanna Lee, senior VP of global consumer and brand marketing at Peloton, said in an email. “We are looking to introduce Peloton to a new audience and track engagement and awareness of the brand with Twitch gamers. We’ll be measuring success through a few key metrics, including total games played, site traffic and unique game players.”

While not a one-to-one competitor to Twitch, social messaging platform Discord last spring launched an interactive ad format, called Quests, in which users take on in-game challenges while streaming to friends. While exclusive to game developers, Discord told Ad Age that Quests is the first step in building an ad business suitable for non-gaming brands.

How ‘The Glitch’ works

Brands will temporarily occupy real estate in “The Glitch” based on the length of their campaigns, said Andrea Garabedian, head of the brand partnerships studio at Amazon Ads. Twitch recommends brands stay in “The Glitch” for at least one fiscal quarter to engage with its community.

As part of the buy, Amazon’s brand partnerships studio will pair brands with streamers to play and promote their Glitch experience on Twitch’s homepage. 

Twitch declined to disclose how much it charges for the offering.

While Twitch plans to host a variety of brands in its new virtual world, Garabedian emphasized that “The Glitch” is a video game first and a marketing platform second.

In the heyday of the metaverse, branded games often became ghost towns, with double-digit or even single-digit player counts, shortly after they launched. To build an experience that keeps players returning, Twitch got Look North World, led by Bungie Co-Founder Alexander Seropian, to design “The Glitch.”

“It’s going to continue to live on regardless of if a brand comes or not,” Garabedian said. “We first and foremost set out to make a great game.”

Gaming for brand awareness

Brands have increasingly looked for gaming investments to move beyond brand awareness and drive quantifiable conversions. In March, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s PlayFronts focused heavily on case studies drawing correlations between time spent in branded games and sales as the results of months-long measurement efforts came to light.

While “The Glitch” largely offers upper-funnel brand awareness for now, Garabedian said that Twitch will eventually look for ways to drive commerce directly from the game.

“We wanted to partner with ‘The Glitch’ because it provides a cohesive and high-visibility activation with media elements within the game, surrounding it, as well as across Twitch,” Kate Trumbull, senior VP and chief brand officer at Domino’s, said via email.