GameSquare is expanding Stream Hatchet beyond livestream measurement, launching Hatchet as a broader creator analytics platform designed to help brands discover creators, track campaigns and measure marketing performance across social and gaming platforms.
GameSquare is reshaping its creator-economy strategy by transforming its livestream measurement service Stream Hatchet into a broader platform called Hatchet, with a focus on creator discovery, campaign management, audience intelligence and marketing analytics.
The company says the revamped platform is designed for brands trying to reach younger audiences through gaming and online creator culture. Rather than analyzing livestream performance as a standalone activity, Hatchet is being positioned as an end-to-end tool that connects creator discovery with campaign execution and measurement.
The shift reflects a larger change in how creators build audiences. Influencers and gaming personalities increasingly operate across several platforms instead of relying on a single channel, making it harder for marketers to understand their overall reach and audience relationships.
From livestream measurement to creator intelligence
Stream Hatchet was originally focused on measuring livestreaming activity, particularly across gaming and esports. Under the new Hatchet model, GameSquare is expanding that capability into creator marketing.
The platform will combine creator discovery, campaign tracking and return-on-investment measurement in a single system. GameSquare says this will allow marketers to identify relevant creators, evaluate their audiences, coordinate campaigns and analyze results without moving between multiple tools.
The company already counts Electronic Arts and NASCAR among Hatchet’s clients.
Its expanded data capabilities cover Twitch, YouTube, Kick, TikTok and other platforms. GameSquare also plans to incorporate information from TikTok Live, X and Instagram, giving marketers a wider view of how creators interact with audiences across different parts of the internet.
That cross-platform approach is central to the company’s strategy.
A creator who performs strongly on one service may have a substantially different audience, engagement pattern or influence on another. Hatchet is therefore designed to help brands evaluate creators as part of a broader digital ecosystem rather than judging them through individual channels.
AI becomes a central part of the platform
One of the biggest additions is AI Smart Search, which GameSquare says is designed to make creator discovery more conversational.
Instead of manually configuring numerous search filters, marketers can describe the type of creator they want in plain language. Hatchet’s system then translates that request into search criteria and identifies potentially relevant creators.
The platform’s underlying data covers more than 50 million creators across more than 30 platforms, according to GameSquare.
The company also says its dataset is built on a decade of livestream and creator-industry insights.
The goal is not simply to produce a larger list of influencers. Hatchet is intended to narrow a huge amount of creator data into information that marketers can use to make campaign decisions.
Its Daily Dashboard is designed to provide personalized insights based on an individual user’s requirements, while AI can also surface creator opportunities proactively.
A single system for creator campaigns
GameSquare is also adding campaign-management capabilities to Hatchet.
The platform’s creator community tools are intended to let marketing teams manage their creator rosters, develop campaign briefs, track activity and coordinate campaigns through one customizable hub.
That could reduce the amount of manual work involved in creator marketing, particularly for brands running campaigns across multiple platforms and working with large numbers of creators.
The company describes the new system as an end-to-end operation in which users can find, verify, analyze, execute and report on creator campaigns from the same platform.
Audience overlap and chat sentiment are among the additional descriptors being incorporated into the platform. GameSquare also says YouTube paid-versus-organic view identification is being developed as another layer of analysis.
Why gaming remains important
Although Hatchet is expanding into the wider creator economy, gaming remains a major part of GameSquare’s positioning.
GameSquare sees gaming as an important part of youth culture and wants brands to use creator data to understand how audiences form communities around gaming, entertainment and internet culture.
CEO Justin Kenna compared the company’s ambition with the role Nielsen ratings play in traditional media: providing marketers with a standardized way to understand the impact of creators and their content.
The difference is that creator marketing is fragmented across platforms, formats and communities. Hatchet’s strategy is to bring those signals together rather than treating each platform independently.
The creator economy is becoming harder for brands to measure
The rebrand comes as creator marketing becomes more complicated.
Creators can simultaneously maintain audiences on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, X and other services. Their influence may also extend beyond follower counts, with audience overlap, engagement, sentiment and campaign performance becoming important considerations for marketers.
That creates a problem for brands: finding a creator is relatively easy, but determining which creator is actually relevant to a specific audience and whether a campaign produced meaningful results can be much harder.
Hatchet is designed around that problem.
Alessandra Pinto, the platform’s director of product, said the company’s objective is to give brands a more complete understanding of the relationship between creators, audiences and internet culture.
What GameSquare is ultimately trying to build
The transformation of Stream Hatchet represents more than a simple rebranding.
GameSquare is moving the business from a tool primarily associated with livestream measurement toward a broader creator marketing intelligence platform.
That puts creator discovery, audience analysis, AI-assisted search, campaign coordination and performance measurement inside the same product.
For marketers, the appeal is straightforward: instead of identifying influencers first and figuring out measurement later, the entire campaign process can be handled through one connected system.
For GameSquare, the move also expands the potential role of Hatchet beyond gaming analytics and into the much larger creator-marketing market.
The company’s challenge now will be turning its large cross-platform dataset into insights that brands can trust and act on. If Hatchet can do that effectively, Stream Hatchet’s evolution could mark a significant shift from simply measuring what creators are doing to helping brands decide where and how they should invest in creator culture.
