Overwolf’s Nathan Lindberg on the Unsung Heroes, Tools, and Services That Make the UGC World Go ‘Round

Editorial content at GamePro has morphed into the everyman creating that content…It's not just happening in gaming. It's happened in movies, music, every other industry…where the audience has an insatiable appetite, and professional editorial content creators can no longer keep up. What do they do? You build a platform. YouTube, TikTok, right? You build Twitch. And you let the everyday person create content for a couple people or a couple million people. And that is kind of what we're seeing in the world of UGC tools and services now, which is where all the excitement comes in with the world of Overwolf.—Nathan Lindberg

In mid-August, Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, hosted Nathan Lindberg, Overwolf’s VP of global brand partnerships, on the Player Driven podcast. The discussion covered a lot of ground and, this week and next, Design Desk will rehash and augment the exchange.

Lindberg has had an interesting career path, which recently came full circle. Shortly after graduating from Ithaca College, he joined GamePro Media, where he played a pivotal role in driving its print-to-digital transformation. He joined Curse in 2009 to spearhead community marketing. In 2015, he moved to Twitch, where he was instrumental in building and monetizing the Rocket League Championship Series and Twitch Rivals. In 2022, Lindberg went to Epic Games, where he developed the NFL Zone in Fortnite creative (which was and remains sponsored by Visa). That user-generated content (UGC) experience led him to Overwolf in 2024—the company that acquired CurseForge from Twitch—bringing him back into the Curse fold.

Posner delivered quite a windup before asking Lindberg the first question.

“He was at GamePro when they turned into digital,” Posner began. “He was at Curse before it became CurseForge. He was at Twitch when plenty of smart people still weren't sure if competitive gaming was gonna be a real business, and helped to build and monetize the Rocket League Championship Series...”

And after a stint at Epic, now “he’s the VP of global brand partnerships at Overwolf,” Posner said, finally landing the plane. “You were at a lot of cool stops, and I’m curious: What changed at every one of those stops and what never changes?”

“When you look at the world of video games there's always innovation,” responded Lindberg, “there's always, you know, new opportunities, new gameplay, new modes, new monetization structures.”

“Entering into the world of Curse, and then the opportunities there, and the great MMO resurgence that happened during that time, like World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, et cetera, you know, a tremendous time in video games…”

“Not only were you buying a $59.99 box retail,” he continued, “if you were crazy, and you were buying the collector's edition, you're going well over a $100. You're also paying $10, $12, $15 a month to keep playing that game that you already paid for. That was a very different buy cycle” than today’s free-to-play norm.

“For game publishers, that was a new era, right, of live service gameplay. Like…’We're gonna launch it, and then we're gonna take care of it as we go.’ That was revolutionary in that timeframe, in terms of getting people into building communities…”

“That was the early days of Curse,” Lindberg clarified. “We were a tools and services company before people realized that they needed tools and services. You had add-ons for your favorite World of Warcraft game. You had, you know, websites and wikis and stuff like that dedicated to your favorite games. You had esports teams playing your favorite games.”

“We started to see the influencer marketplace coming out with YouTube MCNs [Multi-Channel Networks]. And this idea of influencer marketing in the early twenty teens was skeptical. And esports teams were skeptical at the time too. Team Curse was a very early player in that space and fought with the legends, like Dignitas and Cloud9, and kind of those original groups and organizations that were out there.”

“That kinda brought me to the world of Twitch,” he continued. “I spent seven long years convincing the world that people, you know, watch other people play video games. And, like, that was completely counterintuitive to everything that everyone had ever known about video games.”

“It's like, ‘Oh, people go and buy games, and they play them by themselves in their basement as a recluse, right?’ And you're like, ‘No, actually, they're a tremendously fun area, and they're social and they bring people together. They make the world a smaller place. They connect cultures and people across, oceans and across, you know…we went through a global pandemic. And then the impact that Twitch had in that time was supreme.”

“Yeah, I got the opportunity to go to Epic,” elaborated Lindberg. “Epic is an incredible company. They are at the forefront of kind of this UGC universe, and that led me over [or, rather, back] to Overwolf.”

His career trajectory makes a lot more sense if viewed through the lens of UGC monetization across the influencer video-videogame divide.

“The one consistent thing is,” said Lindberg, landing his own plane, “there’s always an expansion. There’s always an evolution. There’s always something new. And I think that that’s one of my favorite, and least favorite, things about the gaming industry, is that no matter how much you know right now, you always got something new coming up next.”

Coming up next for Design Desk, an exploration of how Overwolf’s internal pieces fit together—at root, the software platform supports PC game mods/apps/overlays—and contextualize Overwolf’s approach to compensating UGC creators.

Next week, our focus will shift more toward the ad/brand side of Overwolf’s business, and review some of the company’s recent studio/publisher wins—and get Lindberg’s take on how Rockstar’s soon-to-be-launch Grand Theft Auto VI could/should approach UGC monetization.

In the spirit of the season, please share this nougaty goodness with friends, family, and complete strangers who ring your doorbell tomorrow evening in spooky threads!

CurseForge + Tebex + Nitro = UCG Creator Payout Voltron-Megazord?

There's lots of different ways that we're able to kind of connect and create the value for the creator, while leveling up the business overall, and ensuring that what we're doing is the ultimate goal, which is creator payouts.—Nathan Lindberg

“Overwolf has a lot of pieces,” said Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, to Nathan Lindberg, VP of global brand partnerships at Overwolf, early in their discussion in August. “Curseforge, Tebex” and Nitro. “Do all these pieces actually connect? And can you kinda tell me a story on how they connect?”

“It's always a work in progress when you have multiple sources,” responded a nodding Lindberg. “Eventually, when the team gets together, and comes together right, you get Voltron.”

The goal is to “be the tools and services provider for creators across the board. That means we're helping them monetize. It means we're helping them to transact efficiently and effectively. And it means that they have the creative tools necessary to make the things that they want to make.”

“When you look at our business in general,” he continued, “CurseForge is, obviously, a really powerful tool where you can create mods and add-ons and…that's a great ecosystem.”

“But then you have to figure out how to transact that.”

“Tebex provides a ton of that value,” clarified Lindberg. “On top of that, we have lots of mod pack creators, lots of private servers, who use Tebex for their resources. And we offer advertising solutions to help them to grow their business,” which is where the Nitro part of Overwolf plugs into the larger whole.

He elaborated on this last piece.

Overwolf’s services can help creators “grow their business through advertising. And…brands and agencies, and stuff like that, that wanna transact and wanna be able to advertise to this audience. We can use not only, you know, our game data, but we can also understand payment data, and help to make smarter, and more sophisticated advertising deals that actually end up netting a higher payout to the creator.”

“Oftentimes, it’s like, ‘Well, my objectives are these things,’ and ‘My objectives are these things,’” depending on the part of Overwolf Lindberg that take to, but, at the end of the day, “we all have the same overall objective, which is creator payout.”

“Then we can optimize to that, as a business, and say, ‘Hey, what does this do?’ ‘If ads work with Tebex, how do we help make creator payouts better? If ads work with CurseForge, how do we make creator payouts better?’”

“We bring in brands at times,” elaborated Lindberg, “to sponsor mod creations or to do sponsored mod contests, where people are creating content and getting paid for it, by a brand.”

“You started with Curse,” Posner noted. “And then, all of a sudden, you have Tebex, and you’re building out this Megazord…”

Overwolf acquired Tebex in early 2022 for $29 million. Generally speaking, Tebex takes a 5% cut of paid UGC transactions.

These boys really needed to pick one robot kludge metaphor and stick with it too.

The smart money is on Lion Force Voltron taking down Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Dino Megazord.

“Was this all part of the plan?” asked Posner. “’Hey, we're gonna grow with this. Or are you looking at the need of the customers, as it is, thinking, ‘Hey, we could come up with a solution for this problem’”?

“Our CEO, Uri Marchand, talks about this” topic, responded Lindberg. “Creators are a large group of people. And we are constantly finding new creator ecosystems that we can help support.”

“When we look at the acquisitions—and a number of them were before I joined, so I wasn't a part of them specifically—the reality is that each one of those acquisitions services a creator community, and allows us to help generate more value for those creator communities.”

When Overwolf looks “at opportunities for expansion, it's always in the mindset of ‘What are these creator communities? What are the newest creator communities that are coming? How can we help them? What are their issues?’”

“When it comes to a North Star,” Lindberg continued, “which is very clear—creator payouts— great. How do we pay out more money to creators? And what creators do we include in that? It's a wide variety.”

Design Desk and Player Driven have already gone deep on a top Overwolf/CurseForge creator. Early this year, we profiled Francisco “Sandi” Montaño, who’s raked in mountains of cash based on the cool, popular ARK: Survival Ascended mods that he began making to put a smile on his daughter Sophia’s face.

It’s About Banksy and Deadmau5, Not Clooney

There's level one and there's level 99. And somewhere in between is where you could end up. But that's a great place to be—if you have the passion and the commitment to building those things within the community—and keeping them going.—Nathan Lindberg

“The question I wanna ask here,” said Posner to Lindberg at one point in their August exchange, “is you have AAA on one side, and this enormous indie wave that's continuing to grow, and almost nothing really in the middle between those. You're seeing a rise of AA, which people are sort of calling triple-I, but where does somebody land when they've made a great game” and don’t know what to do with it next?

Lindberg pondered the question.

“A lot of people start by building things out of passion,” he finally said. “’Hey, I love video games. I always wanted to make my own.’ Or ‘I love this particular video game and I wanna create content so that everybody can enjoy it.’ And far too often, we glamorize the, you know, the influencer.”

“What Overwolf has tried to do is, really, to say, ‘Hey, listen: There's a whole different audience here.’ And when you think about it…If you're in a coffee shop, and George Clooney walks in, right, you're…gonna go, ‘Oh, that's George Clooney. I've seen him in movies. I've seen him in his talk shows. I've seen him everywhere.’”

“And that's very glamorous, right? He's good-looking guy. He's very well connected. He's in a lot of great movies.”

But if “someone like Banksy, right, or Deadmau5 walk in, right, and they don't have their head you know, their mask on or whatever, no one notices who they are.”

The people in the coffee shop “may have that painting that Banksy made on the wall. And people are glamorizing it. It's worth $2,000,000, and it's incredible.”

Left to right: Actor George Clooney, a work by the graffiti artist Banksy (Well Hung Lover), and Deadmau5 performing. Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

That's the creator economy that I think doesn't get the attention that it deserves. Because they are creating the tools and services that help to make, not just a couple people but, like, millions of people's lives better, when they're playing the games that they love.

“When folks come into this space,” continued Lindberg, “they create something, and they're like, ‘I don't know. Is this good?’ Like, ‘I have the passion, I have the enthusiasm but I don't know what to do” once the content is finished.

“When you can bring communities together, when you can start to bring groups together…once they're standardized, in terms of the offering…then you can monetize” all that great UCG passion.

“Overwolf has been incredibly successful at saying, ‘Hey, passionate creators come to us. Utilize our tools and services. Build the app that you've always wanted to build. Build the website you've always wanted to build. Build the private server you've always wanted to build.’”

“For some people, that might be beer money for the weekend, right? Gen Z is getting into its drinking phase now.”

“For other people,” Lindberg continued, “we've seen generational wealth come from this. I mean, when you look at some of the largest apps on the Overwolf platform, they've sold for over $40,000,000…Is that standard? No. But as a creator, if you have the passion and you have the desire to do it, Overwolf has really built out the tools and services to help you be able to monetize that passion to the extent that you can monetize it.”

Posner wondered how Lindberg recommended content creators approach Overwolf’s three-headed Cerberus if they sought to harness its power, and grow a fledgling UGC business up from a “beer money” level, to $100,000, and then to $1+ million.

“We have teams that help with all of those areas,” Lindberg replied. “If folks are seeing success, then we're gonna reach out and say, ‘Hi, how can we help you’” build more scale, etc.

If someone on the platform has “gone from zero people using it to, let's say, 25 or a 100, or a thousand people using it, you're gonna get a ping that says, ‘Hey, we've noticed you're building an app. It's a really cool app. There are some really good opportunities. Can we help you? Can we give you some suggestions? Can we work with you on promoting it?’”

“When a creator starts building something and it starts to get that momentum,” continued Lindberg, “we can help pour a little bit of gasoline on that, to help get it going and get it bigger. And as it keeps growing, then we bring in more monetization opportunities…We can help them get to a size and scale that they never thought possible.”

“We've seen creators go from, as I said, level one to level 99. Some are in levels 40 to 50, but they're still very comfortable. They've got a little business. They're doing very well for themselves.”

“Overwolf's goal is not personal glory…We're a platform that's paying out a billion dollars to creators: That's the goal. That's the mindset. That's the North Star that we use.”

“It doesn't necessarily just need to be ads,” elaborated Lindberg. “That's a lot of pressure on me…but it's also about the tools and protection and things that you get from, like, you know, the Tebex team in terms of, ‘Well, how do you do your taxes? How do you…accept payments from other countries? How do you process these things?’”

“For a startup who's just trying to figure it out,” he added, “how to pay, you know, income tax on a $3 mod in Uzbekistan, is a pretty big headache. If you can have it all set up in payment, through one localized source, that makes your life a lot easier. It really it comes down to the fact that we're helping creators not just make money, but also make sure they're protected when they're making that money.”

To recycle the metaphor, a $1+ million app/UCG on Overwolf is the equivalent of George Clooney. What’s happening on the backend, however, Lindberg implied, is something no less important to the final result: Tebex and Nitro are doing anonymous yeoman’s work, like Banksy and Deadmau5, that make “generational wealth” a (slim but real) possibility.

Posner dug further into the topic of creator payouts and who sets the price of things on Overwolf.

“If you're building an app, if you're building a website, if you're building mods, if you're building a private server,” replied Lindberg, “we have best practices that we share with all of our partners. ‘Hey, listen: You can make your decisions, but here are the best practices that we see. Here are the pricing and the opportunities that exist, and here's how you get started in this space.’”

Overwolf creators are “usually people that are just filled with passion. And they wanna do cool stuff, and they wanna be able to drive value, and they're trying to figure out how best to do that. And oftentimes, they're not thinking about the logistics of it, the business side of it. The more we can help with that, the more that we can take away the friction and the better off the outcome ends up being.”

Did I just glimpse Banksy and Deadmau5 scuttling under the floorboards?

Posner was on the same wavelength.

“I wanna re-talk about the Clooney and Banksy” difference, he said, “because I think it’s important…You told me that UGC isn’t just cosmetics anymore. What is it?”

“If you look at the top games,” said Lindberg, taking a big step back, “66 games make up…80% of all time spent in video games. Sixty-six games. And I would say that 35 to 40 of those games are unchanged, and a lot of those games are a decade-plus old. So, how do you stay relevant when you're a video game that came out in 2007, right, or, you know, 2013, like Roblox did”?

To be clear, the Roblox platform debuted in 2006. Roblox Studio—the game engine and development app that creators use to build experiences there—launched along with the platform. What Lindberg was referring to was the launch of the Developer Exchange (DevEx) system in 2013. Roblox had earlier virtual economy features but, with the arrival of DevEx, creators could cash out earned Robux for real-world U.S. dollars, legally and officially, for the first time.

If you’d like a bit more context on DevEx, this recent Roblox creator forum post touched on it. It appears that, eventually, DevEx will be phased out in favor of a more flexible, real-time system, Roblox Wallet and Card, that’s slated to debut in the U.S. in December.

Moreover, the numbers that Lindberg cited w/r/t 66 games contributing 80% of playtime came from a Newzoo report that looked at global PC and console videogame market dynamics in 2023. If you’d like more info on that, a Rock Paper Shotgun article from 2Q 2024 has the deets.

“How are you growing and growing and growing when you came out over a decade ago?” asked Lindberg. “It's UGC. It's community content.”

“Game publishers are realizing that they can outsource the creative work to the everyday person, rev share on it, and have more content, and keep their community engaged, which, ultimately, is their…goal: The LTV, the lifetime value of the user.”

“Creators can be all sorts of things,” elaborated Lindberg. “We think of it as streamer, influencer, TikToker. We don't think about the people that are creating the forums, that are updating the Wiki, that are building the communities that matter, that keep people connected.”

“Think about how frustrated you get when, like, you're playing a game, and it's not working. And you're like, ‘I don't understand. Where is this item? Where is this boss? Why is my character not max level when I got all the things that I need?’”

“You go to a Wiki. You go to a community board. You go to a forum to get that information. If people aren't updating that, you're like, ‘Alright, you know what? Screw it. I'm out of here.’ And that's where the underappreciated people are. And that’s where Overwolf, I think, is really trying to create value for those individuals. Because they are the lifeblood of this ecosystem, and they don’t get the credit. They don’t get the recognition in person. And their product is more popular than them” personally.

That was Banksy and Deadmau5 down there!

People think of creators specifically only as celebrities and as influencers. And it's just not the case. And, in fact, most of the opportunities that exist are off camera…As someone who spent seven years at Twitch, I saw many creators ebb and flow and ebb and flow. But if you make the best, you know…League of Legends app on Overwolf, [it’s] timeless. It doesn't matter what people think of you personally. It's the app and the tools and the service that are the ones that drive it.

“When we talk about creators,” concluded Lindberg, “I really try to make it an important point that we are talking about people who create. And, yes, a lot of people create content. But more people are creating tools and services and the other things that go into the enjoyment of video games, across the space” than just George Clooney.

Okay, that last one was me—but it’s where Lindberg was going.

Come back next week for the concluding round of celebrity Jeopardy! and/or Masked Singer mayhem!