The Sajam Tekken Slam
How an influencer tournament drew over a hundred thousand viewers to a game months after release
Bandai Namco’s Tekken 8 released on January 26 2024 and enjoyed a healthy launch viewership of 119k on Twitch according to analytics site TwitchTracker which remains its current all time high. It’s very common for most games, even ones as big as Tekken 8, to peak early and then drop down to a smaller “core” base of players, as can be seen from looking at the SteamDB stats.
However, if you go and look up Tekken 8’s twitch stats now, you might notice an interesting bump from March of at least 82k viewers just on Twitch, not counting however many additional thousands of people were also watching live streams on YouTube (unlike Twitch, YouTube does not surface this information as easily or freely via its API). It happened almost two months after the game’s launch and is unusual because games typically don’t get a huge spike of attention post-release. Content creators will have fulfilled their influencer campaign obligations and moved on to the Next Big Thing, while regular people will have returned to their usual routine, leaving only the diehards.
This bump was due to the Sajam Tekken Slam Tournament held from Friday March 8 to Sunday March 10. It’s the most fun I have ever had watching Tekken, and even as a piece of traditional media it was incredibly entertaining to watch. It’s also a fascinating case study into just how much of an impact content creators can have, but as ever the devil is in the details.
WAIT, WHAT’S TEKKEN?
Tekken is arguably the most popular fighting game series to exist, particularly among casual players, more so than Street Fighter. The property has sold 50+ million copies in its lifetime and was one of the first 3D fighters to take off in the 90s. Due to the graphical arms race at the time, traditional 2D fighters either attempted a 3D pivot, were relegated to just that niche of fans or went into hibernation until the late 2000s. Though the developers struggled with the response to Tekken 4 — a game that I bought at release and found so disappointing it put me off the franchise for over two decades — the series eventually rallied back, with Tekken 8 being the most high-budget and successful title to date. To get an idea of just how widespread Tekken is, watch Core-A Gaming’s short documentary on the Pakistani Tekken scene.
THE TOURNAMENT FORMAT
The Sajam Tekken Slam is simple: take a bunch of content creators with little or no experience in the game, put them into groups of four with a professional coach, train them intensively for a week, and then pitch the teams against each other in a two-part tournament. In other words, Dancing With The Stars but with fighting games.
[With an idea so basic you’d have thought someone would have done it already. In fact, someone did - The Crazy Raccoon Cup in Japan followed a format very similar to the Sajam Tekken Slam, and managed to attract tens of thousands of viewers just in Japan, but more on that aspect later.]
Over the course of the training week, each team member would respectively try to climb the game’s ranked mode in order to figure out their placement so that the organizers could make sure that similarly skilled players were matched up against one another for the first round of the tournament.
The tournament started round-robin style meaning no matter the outcome, every team faced each other on the Friday, and the results would decide the team placement for the double elimination brackets on Sunday. All games on both days started with the lowest ranked players first playing best of three with the goal of winning three separate sets of games. If both teams ended up taking two sets each, meaning all four content creators on a team had played, then the fifth and final set was decided by a coaches game.
Since round robins take a long time to complete, everyone got a day to rest and review their performance, as well as allow the audience to catch VODs of games that were held at the same time as others that weren’t commentated on by Sajam and Tasty Steve.
For the duration of the tournament, the majority of the participants costreamed with Sajam in the Tekken 8 category on Twitch, with Sajam’s own stream attracting a peak of 35k of the roughly 100k that tuned in to watch. Unlike the Crazy Raccoon Cup, the tournament was entirely self-funded by Sajam and broadcast on Twitch. An hour-long version of the entire week-long event from one team’s perspective was recently put together by Aerij “Brawlpro” Saeed, whose team came second place overall.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PEOPLE INVOLVED
Organizer Stephen “Sajam” Lyon was supported by friend and commentator Steve “Tasty Steve” Scott. Ironically, Sajam himself is not known for either commentating Tekken matches or even playing the game; he’s far better known recently for commentating the EVO finals for DBFZ and Street Fighter 6. Tasty Steve, on the other hand, has spent most of his life traveling the world to commentate Tekken tournaments. This created an interesting dynamic that directly reflected the format of the tournament: one highly experienced with the game and another a beginner, but between the two of them they carry significant clout both within the FGC and on Twitch, which was clearly leveraged to get people on board with the idea in the first place.
While they acted as the “face” of the tournament, behind the scenes Sajam was also supported by a handful of admins and tournament organizers (TOs) that made sure things ran smoothly and that teams would all be lined up to face off against each other in the correct lobbies.
However, the real meat and potatoes were the participants themselves. There were six coaches overseeing four players each, or 30 people total that could potentially compete. I’ve arranged them into a table below along with some approximate numbers for their Twitch channels pulled from TwitchTracker. Both coaches and commentators are in bold. Where relevant I’ve included some YouTube numbers, because some of the competitors primarily post videos on that platform and do not stream to Twitch normally.
What should jump out immediately is the disparity of follower count and average concurrent user count between the coaches and content creators. With the exception of Justin “jwonggg” Wong, most of the pro coaches have fairly low average CCUs. On Twitch, the average CCU is the average number of people that are watching a stream at the same time. While followers can be artificially boosted (as I noted in an older substack post), concurrents are a lot harder to boost. In other words, these are all prominent streamers and not randos Sajam picked up off the street.
The second factor to pay attention to is that each team broadly had their own common theme. Michael “MYK” Kwon, who ultimately finished third after a tense coaches match with Brawlpro, had a team made up of mostly vtubers. Other teams had a lot of League of Legends or Valorant players, which are games that can be as competitive and complex as fighting games. This factor alone ended up doing several things:
Introduced each team member (and their audiences) to an entirely new genre of game
Brought audiences of each team member together as well as those of the other teams who might not otherwise interact — in some cases this dramatically boosted follower counts (particularly the coaches)
Created a sports team-like rivalry between existing fans of the respective streamers and served as another way for the more competitive streamers to prove just how good they actually are
Multiple dramatic or hilarious moments clipped on Twitch
The third factor to pay attention to was the arc of progression of every team member and team not just during the tournament but over the course of the training week. All the stereotypes were present: the unstoppable favorites, the triumphant underdogs, the ones playing characters you love to hate, and so on. This was ample material for the commentators to work with in the downtime between matches and allowed for multiple stories to begin, progress and resolve.
The last factor to bear in mind is that Tekken does not take itself seriously. In case you missed the bear doing karate, the french man in a suit with a samurai sword voiced by Vincent Cassel, or simply the height of Paul Phoenix’s hair — the game is very silly but that is not meant with disapproval. Tekken is pure spectacle, akin to professional wrestling. While the mechanics of it and depth of play may not be obvious to first time viewers, Tekken is so much easier to follow than the more meter-heavy 2D fighting games.
WHERE WERE THE SPONSORS?
Sajam noted on stream after the tournament wrapped that he’d shopped the idea for the tournament around sponsors for well over a year beforehand to no response, eventually shrugging and resolving to fund it himself.
I am baffled that almost no brands or companies wanted to get in on this. I can understand hesitancy over “an unproven format” — but it wasn’t unproven. As Sajam notes in his video, the Crazy Raccoon Cup in Japan was a success. Any major marketing department should be kicking themselves for brushing off the proposal.
The ones who are paying attention and knew that this was conceptually sound are the content creators. Barely a few days pass after the event wraps and this tweet goes out:
This tweet demonstrates another trend that’s common on Twitch but is sometimes hard to pin down. When something on Twitch — a game, an activity, a trend — has a groundswell of popularity particularly among smaller streamers, it can reach a threshold where it breaks through into the higher tiers. The reason this happens is because of a rapid water cooler effect inherent to Twitch’s audience: they aren’t just passively watching one streamer like you might a TV channel; they’re watching streamers of various categories and they’re talking both to each other and to the streamer they’re watching. Twitch even enables this behavior for users through things like gifting subscriptions, or for creators through channel raids where when wrapping up a stream you can send your audience to see a fellow streamer.
Beyond the obvious advice of “pay attention to streamers when they say they’re organizing something”, what the Sajam Tekken Slam did was show off the best of what Twitch is capable of. It is an exciting example of actual entrepreneurship performed by people who know what they’re doing. Expect to see more events like it in the future.