Surprisingly, people liked what I was making...It was a strange feeling, you know, that people were downloading it. Right now, I’m currently sitting at, like, 80 million downloads on my mods, which is just mind-blowing, you know. It just became a business. - Sandi

ARK: Survival Ascended is a 2023 remake of Studio Wildcard’s 2017 hit, ARK: Survival Evolved. Both games effectively pit players against dinosaurs and other prehistoric baddies in a survival MMO environment. Besides being rebuilt from the ground up using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 enhancements, the biggest difference between the two versions is that ARK: Survival Ascended enabled mods from day one. Officially supported mods are sourced from CurseForge, a PC-based modding platform that Overwolf acquired in 2020 for an undisclosed sum.

Sandi’s pathway to becoming a leading CurseForge content creator was both organic and improbable. After studying marketing in college and working in the field for a few years in San Diego, CA, his situation became increasingly untenable.

“My daughter, unfortunately, suffers from seizures,” Sandi said in a Player Driven podcast episode that was published in September. “She has epilepsy. And it came to the point where I just couldn’t stay at the office anymore. I had to be running to school to pick her up because she was having an episode...So I came to the decision with my wife that it was better if I stopped working, stayed at home, and I became a stay-at-home dad to take care of the kids.”

It wasn’t long before playing with the kids evolved into couch co-op video game marathons. At the time, Sandi’s daughter, Sophia, was into creative sandbox and digital dollhouse games like Toca Boca as well. Sandi put two and two together and wondered how hard it would be to start making content for ARK that his daughter might enjoy. He bought a book on Unreal Engine development. He watched several online videos from mod creators. Before long, he was uploading free creations (skins, objects, etc.) into CurseForge.

Sandi was as surprised as anyone to find his downloads climbing through the roof. Sandi’s mods amassed some 30 million downloads before he decided to release his first premium mod, an ARK skin.

“It was a success. Everybody started downloading it, purchasing it, and I was just mind blown,” Sandi told Player Driven host Greg Posner.

In most months since his premium mods debuted, according to Sandi and a Business Insider article from May, this user-generated content (UCG) has cleared well over $10,000 in sales - many times the amount of income Sandi had earned as a marketer. (Note: CurseForge/Overwolf has a 50-50% revenue split model in place with its premium mod creators. The CurseForge ARK page is here and it lists >5,100 mods. As of early November, one one Sandi’s free mods, Modern Structure Skins, was on the top 10 list, and his download total was >106 million. CurseForge is PC-based, but it’s worth pointing out that Sandi’s ARK: Survival Ascended mods work across PCs as well as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.)

What follows is some additional color and context on Sandi’s rapid ascent on CurseForge’s content creator revenue list in 2025 and a broader view of Overwolf’s position in the burgeoning modding/UGC space, courtesy of CMO Shahar Sorek.

Tips, Tricks, and Confessions of A Phenom CurseForge Modder

Recently, I created a mod with zombies in it that actually integrated zombies into ARK: Survival…I reached out to a couple of my content creator friends and they started creating their own, they did a series on the mod itself, you know? So it expands into, “Okay, they’re getting all the views, they’re getting all the attention, but then again, my mod is actually getting the attention as well.” I guess it’s cross-marketing in itself. - Sandi

One of the more interesting, and potentially explosive aspects of the emerging creator economy as it relates to video games is that different types of content creators are already teaming up to amplify each other’s work. Sandi made friends in the livestreaming and video creator space over the years, for example, and he’s parlayed those relationships into a mutually beneficial feedback loop at little to no cost.

“Just from being on YouTube back in the day, I built relationships with other content creators,” he told Posner during their Player Driven discussion. “And so they’re able to promote my stuff for free just out of the friendship of itself. I don’t actually ask them to promote anything, but they go ahead and do it just because we have that relationship.”

“It does kind of put you in a nifty situation though, once you do start reaching out [for] marketing purposes, I guess, trying to sell your thing, and be like, ‘Okay, how about I give you this, I give you some codes, like, I do pay you some sort of balance...’ It kind of bridges the gap between friendship and business, I suppose.”

I guess it’s a new line of influencer now: the mod creator. We went from, obviously, streamers and YouTube creators, to this UGC platform offering it to mod creators to be able to be the new content creator in itself.

Greg asked Sandi how he chooses what to make, and about the tools of his trade.

“I started with Blender, and it just was very overwhelming,” Sandi responded. “It’s just too much. So I jumped onto the modeling tools in Unreal Engine...I was able to turn around a simple object and create something different out of it...I think that’s the way forward for me, just sticking with the Unreal Engine.”

“A tool that I honestly use a lot, and people don’t kind of understand it, it’s the actual analytics that the CurseForge website provides for the game itself. I’m able to guide myself, engage myself by, ‘Okay, people are actually engaging with this game. Maybe I should promote something in here. I should put something in this game.’”

Sandi doesn’t only make ARK mods. He’s also made mods for KRAFTON’s inZOI and Warner Bros. Games’ Hogwarts Legacy.

Sandi believes that, for social live ops games especially, mods like his can be a boon for all involved.

“UGC does kind of retain people with their mods, and they [players] keep coming back just because the new mods keep releasing...When a game comes in with live ops and brings more DLCs into the game, that brings back the player for a certain amount of time, you know?…What mods are creating is that, it kind of bridges that gap in between each DLC or a new game release.”

Another vital input in his development process is direct user feedback.

“I use different platforms. I go through Discord. That’s my main source of communication...If they [users of his mods] have a suggestion, I’ll take it. And if it’s doable, I’ll go ahead and apply it. Obviously, there’s things that I won’t be able to do just because the system itself doesn’t allow [it].”

“Another source that I use is X [and] that’s my primary source of marketing,” continued Sandi. “I throw a little sneak peek, a little picture or something, you know, just to kind of get the crowd going. And then, depending on the engagement that I get off of that, that’s how I decide, ‘Okay, it’s worth applying more time into it versus just a quick thing.’”

“I do go on Facebook every once in a while because that’s where the players who have been around the longest for ARK: Survival Evolved usually sit around and, like, go on. They tend not to go on X or Discord because they don’t like joining those communities…I go by engagement there as well and see what the community likes.”

Overwolf’s CMO, Shahar Sorek, Has Great Plans For the Future

The mission is, “Turn in-game creation into a legitimate profession and enable the creators and the studios to, as seamlessly as possible, work together.” We have a north star: by 2030, to pay a billion dollars out to creators. Last year, we were $240 million. This year, we’ll be higher. - Shahar Sorek

According to the Overwolf website, the Isreal-based company currently serves a global community of 178,000 in-game modders. It bills itself as the “Guild of In-Game Creators” and claims to be the “World’s Leading Ecosystem for In-Game Creations & Content.” The word ecosystem is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. From Overwolf’s perspective, presumably, larger UGC-enabled game platforms and social economies such as Roblox and Fortnite UEFN don’t qualify as ecosystems, a debatable conclusion.

Be that as it may, Overwolf’s CMO, Shahar Sorek, who was also a guest on the Player Driven podcast that featured Sandi, is convinced that the modding ecosystem will grow significantly in the next few years.

Ten of the more than 1,500 titles for which the platform today offers mods or overlays include League of Legends, Valorant, Fortnite, Minecraft, Counter-Strike 2, Teamfight Tactics, Rocket League, Hearthstone, Rainbow Six Siege, and World of Warcraft. All these games have millions of hardcore fans around the globe. Sorek believes the combination of player passion, talented modders, and game studio efforts will unlock a larger revenue stream in short order.

Sorek told Posner that mod “creators, of course, are first gamers themselves. But up until this era of gaming, there weren’t really big motions of game studios to embrace mods as they do today. It’s still growing, but we’ve passed a point of no return where UGC is now becoming a major growth engine for game studios.”

“Sandi’s kind of at the pinnacle of the latest [Overwolf] rollout and he mentioned things like dynamic downloading and all sorts of things we baked in rather recently into our product. But UGC is anything from a mod, an overlay, a private server, a complete new world...Our role in the world is to turn modders, or as we call them, in-game creators, into a legitimate profession, very much like what YouTube did to streamers.”

“The way we see the world is that creators, in many, many ways, are the new creator category in games that’s going to drive the next era of gaming. We see it at scale also with Roblox and Fortnite, and with Overwolf. Each of them serve a different type of creator category. We’re more of a horizontal player.”

A recent Forbes article claimed Overwolf’s in-game creator payouts were on track to exceed $300 million this year. If accurate, that’s a 25% year-over-year rise. If payouts keep rising at that pace through 2030, that works out to $916 million, which would be a stone’s throw from Overwolf’s 2030 stretch goal.

If there’s a fly in the proverbial ointment, it’s that Overwolf’s algorithm for determining creator payouts may be something of a black box. This is also true for Roblox and Fortnite UEFN, but doesn’t change the fact that some Overwolf creators couldn’t accurately predict their income, at least as of three years ago, according to this Reddit thread.

Even if this has changed, and if Overwolf’s in-game creators today have great visibility into the mechanics of the platform’s revenue sharing system, it’s still true that Overwolf could change its payout terms and algorithms at any time, just as YouTube, Twitch, Roblox, and Fortnite UEFN have all done to their creator economies in recent years. Sure, Sandi and company are innovative creators. Thousands of in-game creators may also make a good living off their creations in 2025. We must never lose sight of the fact, however, that these creators are far closer to being Uber drivers than independent business owners.