Open World wants game developers of all sizes to see creators as a marketing opportunity.
Today, March 4, the gaming marketing agency and consultancy Open World announced its acquisition of Drope.me, an influencer marketing platform that connects game developers with content creators. The purpose of the acquisition was to help Open World scale up its marketing tools for game makers interested in reaching creators’ audiences. Representatives of both companies declined to share more details about the terms of the deal or its valuation of Drope.me.
“We’re seeing the industry is definitely moving from just focusing solely on launch spikes and big marketing moments to being able to support always-on creator ecosystems,” said Open World senior vice president of creator programs Adam Dempsky in an interview with GamesBeat. “We were missing the infrastructure and the systems that would be needed in order to really maximize these solutions at scale, so that’s definitely where Drope came in.”
Although Open World is planning to integrate Drope.me into its pre-existing offering, rather than keeping the platform separate, the agency is not planning to shrink the size of the Drope team, much of which is based in Ukraine, as a result of the acquisition. Instead, Open World plans to expand Drope’s staff, with CEO and co-founder Dima Okhrimchuk staying on to manage the platform’s engineering team, although his official job title at Open World is yet to be determined.
“Our main focus, historically, has been on indie game developers and smaller creators. This has been our bread and butter; we haven’t been able to reach those large developers or larger creators,” Okhrimchuk said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We’ve been specifically focusing on a completely different side of the market, and I think this is what makes this partnership very complementary and very beneficial for both sides.”
What sets Drope apart from other influencer marketing platforms is its reward-based approach, with Drope paying creators based on both the promotional content they make and how their community responds to and engages with that content. Drope tracks and rewards actions like reaching certain achievements in-game or adding a game to a user’s Steam wishlist, creating a performance-based model for game makers looking to reach creators’ audience in meaningful ways.
“Drope is allowing us to have the means to not only work with creators at the scale we want, but also giving them the incentives and the motivation to continue to work with a brand partner or with a gaming publisher over time,” Dempsky said.
As game makers continue to struggle with discovery and user acquisition in 2026, they are increasingly viewing creators and creator marketing as one of the brightest potential paths forward. At GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat’s annual conference in San Francisco last November, GamesBeat co-hosted a standing-room-only roundtable with Open World about this topic. Business moves like Open World’s acquisition of Drope.me underscore the importance of this growing channel in the eyes of game developers and marketers.
“If you are activating the creator ecosystem only at the time of release, or of the marketing campaign, you are missing probably 70 percent of the opportunity that lies within creators,” said Zachary Diaz, the head of Krafton’s creator network and a participant in the GamesBeat Next roundtable, in an interview with GamesBeat. “And that’s everything from top-tier influencers, the biggest of the biggest, to the community people who are coming up now. I’m not shocked that this is a step that they’re taking.”